Guild Wars 2

Eh, skipping 8 pages of fluff.

I come from a grindy MMO background. From Runescape, to Maplestory, to Perfect World etc. I play a lot of Diablo 3 and Borderlands 2 to get my daily fix of grinding.

GW2 has very little grind. None for levels, none for armour. Your armour and level improves with player progression. The only thing I would consider a grind is Glory, which ANet is removing anyway.

Running maybe 2 dungeons a week and spending all my remaining game time in WvW has gotten my level 80s geared with exotics and ascended, only some armour skins being bought off the TP cause WvW skins are pretty ugly.

If you consider Legendaries being a grind, then I suggest you go and actually play MMOs with game completion rewards. They’re far more time consuming to obtain than GW2’s legendaries, which can be obtained in under a month of “hardcore” play.

Reverence.6915:

Eh, skipping 8 pages of fluff.

Nice dismissal of everyone else’s contribution to thread.

Reverence.6915:

Eh, skipping 8 pages of fluff.

I come from a grindy MMO background. From Runescape, to Maplestory, to Perfect World etc. I play a lot of Diablo 3 and Borderlands 2 to get my daily fix of grinding.

GW2 has very little grind. None for levels, none for armour. Your armour and level improves with player progression. The only thing I would consider a grind is Glory, which ANet is removing anyway.

Running maybe 2 dungeons a week and spending all my remaining game time in WvW has gotten my level 80s geared with exotics and ascended, only some armour skins being bought off the TP cause WvW skins are pretty ugly.

If you consider Legendaries being a grind, then I suggest you go and actually play MMOs with game completion rewards. They’re far more time consuming to obtain than GW2’s legendaries, which can be obtained in under a month of “hardcore” play.

When comparing two things, if the first is better than the second does not mean that the first is good.

That may be too abstract, let me spell it out. Just because Maple story (or whatever) has more grind than GW2 does not mean that GW2 does not have grind or that the level of grind is acceptable.

No. He’s right. There is no grind if you simply purchase everything by way of the gem shop and trading post. Grinding is not worth the effort because it’s so unrewarding.

“Not that bad” is still a form of “bad”.

You don’t need gold in WoW and a proper raid guild means 4-12hrs a week at max.
Making money in Maplestory is only to reduce the time it takes to farm more levels.

The problem with GW2 is its a cosmetic based game that locks skins behind gold instead of gameplay and actual progression is limited. At the moment, the only end-game is leveling up your pvp level or wvw rank because fotm/dungeons are garbage.

Charak.9761:

You don’t need gold in WoW and a proper raid guild means 4-12hrs a week at max.
Making money in Maplestory is only to reduce the time it takes to farm more levels.

The problem with GW2 is its a cosmetic based game that locks most skins behind gold and gems instead of gameplay and actual progression is limited. At the moment, the only end-game is leveling up your pvp level or wvw rank because fotm/dungeons are garbage.

Just thought I’d be fair. We do have some skins, like the fractal skins, Zenith Skins, Hellfire/Radiant skins and Aetherpath/Tequatl skins (Though in all fairness, Those are RNG based, not actual rewards for anything, and the Tequatl skins had such a low drop rate that they’ve increased it thrice now..)

Suddenflame.2601:

ronpierce.2760:

Just because some games have even worse designers doesn’t make the rng and grind in gw2 acceptable…. It just means it’s not the worst contender. Also GW2 is aimed for a us/eu audience, the audiences who least enjoy long terrible grinds.

Name one MMORPG that has better RNG and grind?

hard to say “better grind” because i find grind in general bad, if you mean less grind then i might know a few.
SWToR is one, the reason being that you’ll enjoy the game while questing so it’s difficult to notice the grind, RNG always has some guaranteed stuff so that’s another.
the original GW has allot less grind, you can get max level within a day if you want to and getting materials is quite easy, it just takes a bit of time.

oh wait, you said one…..

Seven Star Stalker.1740:

Charak.9761:

You don’t need gold in WoW and a proper raid guild means 4-12hrs a week at max.
Making money in Maplestory is only to reduce the time it takes to farm more levels.

The problem with GW2 is its a cosmetic based game that locks most skins behind gold and gems instead of gameplay and actual progression is limited. At the moment, the only end-game is leveling up your pvp level or wvw rank because fotm/dungeons are garbage.

Just thought I’d be fair. We do have some skins, like the fractal skins, Zenith Skins, Hellfire/Radiant skins and Aetherpath/Tequatl skins (Though in all fairness, Those are RNG based, not actual rewards for anything, and the Tequatl skins had such a low drop rate that they’ve increased it thrice now..)

The only skin I like in this game are SAB weapons from TM because those CANT be bought with gold, so they display true skill progress even if they are the most particle effecty skins out there.

And Teq weapon skins are reskins, I don’t approve of that design nature in games.

Charak.9761:

Seven Star Stalker.1740:

Charak.9761:

You don’t need gold in WoW and a proper raid guild means 4-12hrs a week at max.
Making money in Maplestory is only to reduce the time it takes to farm more levels.

The problem with GW2 is its a cosmetic based game that locks most skins behind gold and gems instead of gameplay and actual progression is limited. At the moment, the only end-game is leveling up your pvp level or wvw rank because fotm/dungeons are garbage.

Just thought I’d be fair. We do have some skins, like the fractal skins, Zenith Skins, Hellfire/Radiant skins and Aetherpath/Tequatl skins (Though in all fairness, Those are RNG based, not actual rewards for anything, and the Tequatl skins had such a low drop rate that they’ve increased it thrice now..)

The only skin I like in this game are SAB weapons from TM because those CANT be bought with gold, so they display true skill progress even if they are the most particle effecty skins out there.

You can’t buy fractal skins either, and they only drop at a certain level of difficulty, now and then.

I get what you’re saying. I just think it’s fair to give the credit where due, even if the credit is small.

Seven Star Stalker.1740:

Charak.9761:

Seven Star Stalker.1740:

Charak.9761:

You don’t need gold in WoW and a proper raid guild means 4-12hrs a week at max.
Making money in Maplestory is only to reduce the time it takes to farm more levels.

The problem with GW2 is its a cosmetic based game that locks most skins behind gold and gems instead of gameplay and actual progression is limited. At the moment, the only end-game is leveling up your pvp level or wvw rank because fotm/dungeons are garbage.

Just thought I’d be fair. We do have some skins, like the fractal skins, Zenith Skins, Hellfire/Radiant skins and Aetherpath/Tequatl skins (Though in all fairness, Those are RNG based, not actual rewards for anything, and the Tequatl skins had such a low drop rate that they’ve increased it thrice now..)

The only skin I like in this game are SAB weapons from TM because those CANT be bought with gold, so they display true skill progress even if they are the most particle effecty skins out there.

You can’t buy fractal skins either, and they only drop at a certain level of difficulty, now and then.

I get what you’re saying. I just think it’s fair to give the credit where due, even if the credit is small.

fotm is a joke as well, 49 can be cleared daily by practically everyone. I have a bunch of fractal skins that I probably will never use because they are unattractive cosmetically.

ITT: OP pointing out that murdering someone and wearing their skin is worse than just murdering them.

Blatantly ignoring the fact that it’s the murder itself that’s the problem.

Suddenflame.2601:

ronpierce.2760:

Just because some games have even worse designers doesn’t make the rng and grind in gw2 acceptable…. It just means it’s not the worst contender. Also GW2 is aimed for a us/eu audience, the audiences who least enjoy long terrible grinds.

Name one MMORPG that has better RNG and grind?

FFxiv

Suddenflame.2601:

morrolan.9608:

Suddenflame.2601:

I am not avoiding the issue because it is not an issue. 2000 hours played no precursor drop is not an issue.

It is for most people. the fact that you personally don’t think its an issue is only indicative of your subjective point of view.

Suddenflame.2601:

The issue would be if they didn’t drop at all, but we know that they do drop and pretty frequently

I do not think that word means what you think it means. If the majority of the playerbase has had no percursor drop for them in thousands of hours of play then it is not frequent.

Look at trading post for how many there is being sold. There is a decent number being sold meaning a large supply.

What you see in the TP are the daily winners of the lottery. If you took a poll of all the IRL winners in all the lotteries across the country you would find a lot of winners and some who had won big. Because of the odds, the chances are it won’t be you. And, because the odds are the same each time you play, if you just play more, the chances are you will not win. This is why financial advisors never advise people to just buy more lottery tickets in order to improve their chance of winning. Precursors exist on the TP simply because some people win the lottery.

Cina Reas.6938:

Suddenflame.2601:

ronpierce.2760:

Just because some games have even worse designers doesn’t make the rng and grind in gw2 acceptable…. It just means it’s not the worst contender. Also GW2 is aimed for a us/eu audience, the audiences who least enjoy long terrible grinds.

Name one MMORPG that has better RNG and grind?

FFxiv

Or WoW which I am currently playing. The loot system is very well tuned there through years of experience, and you can expect reward for play, unlike GW2.

Raine.1394:

Cina Reas.6938:

Suddenflame.2601:

ronpierce.2760:

Just because some games have even worse designers doesn’t make the rng and grind in gw2 acceptable…. It just means it’s not the worst contender. Also GW2 is aimed for a us/eu audience, the audiences who least enjoy long terrible grinds.

Name one MMORPG that has better RNG and grind?

FFxiv

Or WoW which I am currently playing. The loot system is very well tuned there through years of experience, and you can expect reward for play, unlike GW2.

I dunno about WoW but GW1 had way less grind for BIS gear. The Ascended travesty goes against the principles of Anets Manifesto. In GW1 there was grind but it was purely aesthetic and not for BIS gear. GW2 is 100x worse for grind than GW1. Not to mention that the “grind” for aesthetics in GW1 was also 100x more fun.

As far as RNG goes, Time gated content and pathetic drop rates make the game less enjoyable than GW1. There is no middle ground for drops really.You have standard greens and blues, the occasional rare with 20s, the rare exotic worth 1g, then very very rarely someone gets the unbelievable luck of a exotic worth 5-100g(which I have never had in 2000 hours) followed by the impossible precursor drop worth multiple 100s(which I have only seen one drop, and that was in beta…).
GW2 is more nickel and dime for your rewards than GW1 it seems to me.
I bet this is because gold is tied to real life cash and the world TP.

GW2, grind forever with timegated content or pull out your visa

The only way to fix the “problem” would be to make any and all of the TP related items available through normal gameplay. Which, to be honest, is what it SHOULD have been in the first place.

As it is, the drop rate for anything in game is horrendous, the reward vs. time can only be measured in gold, because the only reward worth anything is gold. Through gold you can eventually buy whatever it is that you should have been able to get in-game in the first place.

Then there’s the terrible feature of being able to buy gold for real money. The end effect of this is already clear – the people willing to spend the most real-life money on the game are going to always have better things than those who spend time playing.

In essence, the gem shop + living story have been far worse, from a reward for gameplay perspective, than if they’d gone with the tried and trued GW1 model of expansions and reward coming from gameplay.

The gemshop should have never had anything except for the storage/character slot/town clothes/backpack items. Everything else has been wrongly captured behind a purchase, where it should have existed as an in-game reward.

TL:DR – the gem shop, ability to trade real money for gold, and abyssmal drop-rate are all related, and a flaw of this particular income method for a game. Selling boxes, and having only luxury items (never currency) available through the gem shop, would have required them to make in game rewards better – otherwise people would never have kept playing.

Charak.9761:

You don’t need gold in WoW and a proper raid guild means 4-12hrs a week at max.
Making money in Maplestory is only to reduce the time it takes to farm more levels.

The problem with GW2 is its a cosmetic based game that locks skins behind gold instead of gameplay and actual progression is limited. At the moment, the only end-game is leveling up your pvp level or wvw rank because fotm/dungeons are garbage.

Truth

Chuo.4238:

“Not that bad” is still a form of “bad”.

That’s the thing that gets me. They are dismissive. And then there’s the people who claim that even 1 day of work on a toon is a grind. that’s so not the definition of a grind.

A grind is something you have to do for an extended period of time to remain competitive in any part of the game.

That means that the grind here, for ascended gear, whether they agree on how much of an advantage it gives players or not (which is irrelevant btw) is a grind. In order to get the ascended right now in it’s current incarnation, you have to spend months gathering the required materials and building whole sets of what you need. Not everyone uses just 1 weapon type, some use two and often the cost is the same for 1 off hand as it is for a mainhand so that right there is double the time.

If you look at similar systems in other titles, even in those titles well known for extending the gameplay time for the purpose of slowing down progression they aren’t as bad as the ascended grind on this title.

And then there’s the whole “what they promised us the game wouldn’t be” argument that people who claim the grind isn’t a problem are completely ignoring.

You must be joking or trolling or both right ?
I’ve been playing since b4 launch and I have yet to see 1 kitten precursor either from drop or the kitten mystic toilet. That should tell you how horrible RNG is in this kitten game it;s about the only thing that might actually make me kitten quit this game I love so much.

Latinkuro.9420:

You must be joking or trolling or both right ?
I’ve been playing since b4 launch and I have yet to see 1 kitten precursor either from drop or the kitten mystic toilet. That should tell you how horrible RNG is in this kitten game it;s about the only thing that might actually make me kitten quit this game I love so much.

Or an ascended drop, and I play every day and rarely miss a daily. It’s really enough to make me feel like the game hates me and I should move on.

Suddenflame.2601:

To everyone complaining about Random Number Generator (RNG) and grind in Guild Wars 2 (GW2): You guys need to play more Massively Multiplayer Online Roly Playing Games (MMORPG).

You guy need to play more tabletop role-playing games (PnP).

TooBz.3065:

When comparing two things, if the first is better than the second does not mean that the first is good.

That may be too abstract, let me spell it out. Just because Maple story (or whatever) has more grind than GW2 does not mean that GW2 does not have grind or that the level of grind is acceptable.

Depends on your definition of grind I suppose, and how you look at GW2.

If you look at GW2 as your traditional MMO, where you HAVE to get BiS gear to be competitive, then yes, GW2 is grindy. Incredibly grindy. I just shudder to think of the grind for mats required if I want to get BiS

However! GW2 is different in that those BiS gear isn’t necessary to complete any content available. It’s there as an end game goal that you’ll eventually obtain by playing the game naturally. Having ascended or legendary doesn’t make you any better than someone in exotics. It just makes you look fancier.

Why would you ruin your experience of the game by grinding it out? Just seems silly to me.

In any other MMO, your next tier of gear is REQUIRED to be competitive in either PvE or PvP, and therefore you have to grind for it. This isn’t the case in GW2, so I honestly don’t see any grind. I just log in, play WvW and sPvP, complete my dailies while killing enemy players, and accumulate mats through the loot bags I get from my kills (I make most of my gold this way, selling t6 mats is very profitable, still have enough left over to craft a bit of ascended). Is there a grind in what I do? No. There isn’t.

I just wish it was a little easier to level alts, since I’m not big on exploring. Like I said in my previous post, I’m used to grinding – not having anywhere to grind levels out is rather weird, and I hate champ trains cause of all the waypoints necessary (dat loading screen time).

IDK why people are so upset about the “grind” in this game. I can get a new level 80 geared in zerker exotics + scholar runes in like 2 days of dungeon runs. That is 8 hours split between 2 days, or 2 hours over 4 days. For all but main characters that is all you need for 99.99 of PVE non fractal content. Its even easier to get most wvw gear because most of the sets are pretty cheap. You want a legendary? Stop being plebes and earn some gold. 3k gold: 30 gold a day: 100 days. Yeah, that is painful but that is top item buying outright instead of making one. 2 months of play per legendary is very doable if you are making one/not going for the most popular. Honestly earning karma is more of a pain in the butt because they killed karma for dungeon runs. Ascended gear items are way easier to earn than that, its the time gating that gets people more than anything. Anybody who knows how to earn gold can finish their set within a month without even trying that hard. Getting complete best in slot items with only a couple months of play? Very easy to do, that is just doing easy dungeon paths over a couple hours everyday. You can even pop into WB events between runs to keep it interesting. Hell I threw my garbage WB yellows into the forge with stones and managed to get zap and the one for dreamer, sure lotto chances ect, but once you have all the other gifts tossing some in at the same time you earn the gold isn’t that bad.

Open world is bad loot/time invested, trains are very boring even compared dungeons and even at best don’t earn as much as dungeons… WvW is hit and miss because bag dropping fights aren’t constantly happening, you can spend 20 minutes running around the map trying to find a fight even when zerging.

Playing long enough to earn a daily and tagging some events isn’t going to earn you squat in the way of gold. You have to do the content that actually pays, do the things that give decent drops, and know all the tricks to salvaging. Hint: salvage ectos/inscriptions from dungeon token items. Watch for drops that have sigils/runes worth more than the item its on.

But I like open world content! I don’t like dungeons! Well go to midlevel areas and do some dynamic events with lots of mobs. The stuff they drop have a much higher amount of high value mats. Heck level your characters to mid levels to increase your mid tier mats/salvages. Since everybody is either doing QD train or end of game mobs… bottom and top tier mats have no value but there is scarcity in the mid level stuff.