Guild Wars 2

Hey all,

This is my first forum post so excuse me if I make any mistakes. You can tell me my mistakes and I’ll try to keep this in mind for the next post. Also keep in mind that this is mostly based on my own opinion and experience. With that said …

Heart of Thorns is finally out! A new land to explore, new bosses to fight, new loot to find and a Guild Hall to claim. Whenever I read something new about HoT prior to it’s release, I got more and more excited. We are now a few days in and I have to say: Heart of Thorns on it’s own, is pretty good … BUT

It is also having serious negative impacts on the base game and I’ll tell you why.

First of all, HoT is much harder than the base game, which I like. Mobs are more challenging, Hero Challenges are difficult and bosses require some skill. However, the rewards are just not worth the effort. I now get far less rewards then when I did before HoT released and with the recent nerfs on the base game rewards, including dungeons and events, things aren’t looking to get better anytime soon.

The biggest problem is that ANET shot themselves in the foot by making GW2 free to play. I have no problem with it going FTP, I think it can be a positive thing and ANET said they want to compel people to buy HoT by making great content. However, with the recent nerfs and planned nerfs that they talked about, it makes me wonder. If you make great content, why all these nerfs?

The truth is that they don’t wanna compel people into buying HoT for better content, but for better loot. They are preparing for raids to be released and these can only be played if you bought HoT. So what can you do? Just nerf everything else in the game ofcourse!

It’s no secret that ANET doesn’t care about the MAW events or the dungeons. Neither have been updated in the last 2 years and now that we finally get an update on them, it’s to simply nerf them for the expansion.

I really feel that ANET is dropping the ball here. Not only are the rewards just not worth the effort, the Black Lion Trading Company market is turning into a giant mess.

Rares are deflating with prices dropping to almost half the cost, while materials are skyrocketing to insane degrees! This not only makes getting rares unrewarding, it makes doing the harder events in HoT unrewarding. Not only that, but the raids sound like they plan to replace everything and it feels like GW2 is not seperating itself from other MMO’s, it’s actually working to become a standard MMO as raids seem to be the most important thing now.

And I understand why. You don’t want these raids to be abandonded by the player base after 2 weeks or so. The right thing to do would have been to increase the rewards with the effort you put in the event.

I’m not saying this cause I hate GW2, I’m saying this cause it is my favorite MMO ever, but the road that ANET sees is just one that I do not wish for them to follow. And it will only get worse as more and more raids will be made and dungeons, maw events and most other things in PvE that isn’t HoT related seems to just be forgotten and left in the dust.

What this makes me believe is that if they make another expansion, they will do the exact same thing to HoT. Content should be compelling in it’s own right, not because it just has better rewards. If you do, then all I see is a company that has no faith in the content that it puts out to sell itself.

I’m just asking those at ANET to please reconsider some of these changes. The only events worth doing now are the fractals and some of the HoT events. Everything else is just there to waste your time and give very little to nothing in return.

That’s my thought on this whole nerfing and HoT business.

In my opinion, GW2 has been on this road for a long time. The majority of the players seem to enjoy earning rewards for being bored (silverwastes, champ trains, dry top, etc.).

GW2 caters to them and to traders. Everyone else… not so much.

The major weakness with free to play is the game restructures itself to encourage spending real money.

I have been playing since it came out 3 yrs ago just about every day. I have not been bored and I have had no problems with the rewards at all. I just play to have fun and fun is what I have been having.

I both agree, and disagree. See, the thing is, is that you have to play the content, in order to get the rewards. As has been seen in alot of the reddit threads, here lately, is that people expect something for nothing – to a degree. I am not saying that you are wrong. I think the current rewards for the older content has gone from ok, to kinda bad.

On the other hand, having zone rewards now, for T6 materials has been an EPIC change to everything. Its easier to just play through event chains, have a blast doing it, and getting several T6 mats, instead of the hoping and praying game that we got with RNG on those materials, IF we weren’t avid dungeon speed runners. HUGE KUDOS to ANet for this!

I think that stuff just takes time to farm out, and you have to pace yourself ALOT, instead of expecting to polish a few stacks of something immediately.

I think the best change that could be made here, is to have particular MAW event bosses drop 5 of any given lodestone that fits their elemental attacks. For example, MegaDestroyer dropping the Destroyer Loadstones, or whatever they are called. Have JorLag drop the ice lodestones – the T6 ones.

With that, it puts the emphasis back on rewarding event/old content/group gameplay.

As far as dungeons: Honestly, i just don’t care. I did them as a thing to get dungeon tokens and an achievement. Much past that, i wasn’t too worried about them nerfing the gold reward. On the bright side, they’ll be taking that dungeon community and putting them into raids, where they will once again, find their rewards. So in that respect, its only time.