Guild Wars 2

I have played GW2 for almost 4 years now. Recently, some of my friends decided to give the game a try and so I immediately jumped in to play with them, show them what the game is about and so on. We are all players who enjoy the lore and immersion so we decided to chill out and complete some maps instead of rushing to lvl 80.

The thing is, it is very hard to enjoy playing GW2 with your low level friends, especially regarding map completion. Completing vanilla GW2 maps doesn’t even feel like playing together. Theoretically, we share the same goal and play the same content, but due to the fact that every party member has to progress his heart by himself, it doesn’t feel like we are helping each other or helping anyone at all really. There are A LOT of problems with that:
– We constantly have to wait for each other after we are done with heart so we can continue (or else we quickly end up in diferent places entirely)
- We don’t feel like we made any difference because while the first person is already given a letter of gratitude for saving lives/village/whatever, the others are still doing the same thing we were thanked for (and therefore it feels pointless).
- While killing mobs theoritically is the one thing that we got shared progress for, in reality it often slows us all down because mobs die in 3 hits and so it is really difficult for party members to tag them all (and so it’s almost like KSing because sometimes there’s just not that many mobs around).

Overall, I think it sucks when playing together doesn’t reward you at all and while it is not true for the majority of GW2 content (especially engame content), it is VERY true for completing maps and that bothers me immensely. What’s more, it prevents me (and a lot of other players) from completing the map on my Alts because it’s for the most part boring to replay alone and yet it is not suited to be played with friends. It is almost always more fun to play MMO with friends than playing it alone and I would be VERY happy if I could do it with my low level friends before they reach endgame.

Because of all of the things I mentioned above, I came to the conclusion that Renowned Hearts progress should be shared with party members. It could be made to scale up with more people in a party (similiar to how “collect” events scale up), but nonetheless it should be a thing. I strongly believe it would make wonders for the game and player population.

What do you think?

While you may think you are doing better because you have better equipment in reality you are doing better because you are more used to the game. For example, you are just used to knowing the fastest way to complete a heart (which is often by doing whatever dynamic event spawns next to it). I would suggest taking that as an opportunity to share the knowledge with them. You will probably still finish fast because they are not used to game mechanics but they will be much faster than if tossed into the pool sans instructions.

Sharing hearts is probably no small task to implement. What you can do is explore as a party and do dynamic events near hearts. A lot of the hearts will take care of themselves for each of you at about the same rate.

I agree with you OP. GW2 does the party system, renown hearts, shared XP etc. really well and encourages grouping up, but the individual progress for the hearts is something completely opposite.

I also noticed this when my friend started playing; I felt like there was nothing I could do to help him progress, except safeguard him and kill mobs he had tagged, following him around getting bored to death. The heart progress should be shared party-wide.

Before anyone says it, sure, this could (and would) cause exploits where 5-man parties could clear 5 individual hearts at the same time and get the map progress much faster etc. These sort of problems could be easily prevented by limiting the progress to those party members who are in the heart area, or some other similar solution.

Most hearts (even if they do not list it) have as a progress method killing attacking mobs. You and the people you are helping can just join in a dynamic event near it and pretty much the same thing that you want will happen. Your other party members will get credit for your kills as long as they got a blow or two in before the thing died (gear down if things are dying too fast). You can do the same for whatever creature needs to be killed in that area as well, but events are the much faster way to advance hearts.

I’ve noticed the same things with hearts and groups. Anyone who finishes early will then have nothing to do to help out except maybe help kill mobs. It means time standing around with little to do while the other group members finish up. There not always a dynamic event around to do.

Chad.6104:

There not always a dynamic event around to do.

True, but hopefully the person who is showing others around knows the signs when there will be one soon. Even if you do not know the exact things around that heart if there is not something out-of-the-ordinary (like NPCs talking) go map some more waypoints and keep your ear to the ground. There are also exact times for the low level bosses and their pres.

Menadena.7482:

Chad.6104:

There not always a dynamic event around to do.

True, but hopefully the person who is showing others around knows the signs when there will be one soon. Even if you do not know the exact things around that heart if there is not something out-of-the-ordinary (like NPCs talking) go map some more waypoints and keep your ear to the ground. There are also exact times for the low level bosses and their pres.

It’s not always groups with one person showing others around. It’s also groups of friends playing together and doing map completion together. I think its asking a bit much to tell people doing a heart to stop doing that heart and find events or waypoints elsewhere instead. Why not ask for better group design for doing hearts instead?

The thing is, the system should be seemless for players to enjoy, but it is not. Even if I play on low level character, I constantly have to focus on NOT killing mobs, just tagging them, which is really counterintuitive and silly if you think about it. It gets even worse on max lvl characters, because I find myself switching all my stuff to support – not because my friends need support, but because otherwise things just die to kitten easily.
And while it’s true that events make things much smoother, in reality most of the time you have to complete Hearts without them, because there’s not as many of them on vanilla maps. You rarely have an opportunity to trigger them by yourself and often they are not even enough to complete Heart.

I suppose ANet identified the problem at least partially, because on LWS3 maps the problem is almost non-existent thanks to abundance of events and mobs not dying as easily. That being said, I understand that it would be an absurd amount of work to redo vanilla content. That’s why I think simpler solution needs to be applied. Let the progress “tick” for all the party members that reside in the Heart area. That’s all. Do you think it would be a lot of programming? It doesn’t seem like it…

The core game needs rebalancing in a big way to be honest.

The NPE made the whole thing a joke and i have to disagree with one of the statements here, while it’s true that you are probably used to the game, equipment makes a huge difference.

That being said it’s also a problem that mobs in the core areas are way too squishy, doe nothing in terms of attacks and teach you absolutely nothing about teamplay.
Combined with an often laughable event density it can make exploration with friends tedious, speaking from my own experiences so far.
Don’t know if your friends own or know HoT already but i think they’ll hit a brick wall as soon as they get there, not because HoT is bad but because the core game doesn’t prepare you for it.