Guild Wars 2

I’m not a regular forumgoer. My viewpoints aren’t exactly authoritative. But the outcry in recent weeks is not only louder, but much more… articulated than the usual nerdrage.

Now, there’s always been an almost sort of endless mistwar between the ragers/trolls and the white knights. But recently, discourse, has been very… specific.

For me, I have been a pretty faithful fan of GW2. I bought the core game, two $10 alt accounts, and pre-ordered HoT. I don’t spend a lot of money on games, but I have bought thousands of gems and saved up $50 specifically for this expansion, which is a consideration not personally adopted since Mass Effect 3 came out.

Expectations were high.

Disappointment abounded.

But I’m clearly not alone. Across the forums there are multiple stated problems, raised repeatedly, but which remain separate. I think seeing the list in its entirety will have a greater effect.

tl;dr consolidating praise and complaints
will update as good suggestions/counterpoints/contrary arguments offered

The good:
1 Revenant is clearly popular in PvP and PvE
—Fun mechanics, good utility
2 Elite stuff mostly pretty nice in PvE
—Key word “mostly”
—Won’t go into each, most of this was detailed during beta
3 The new maps are sweet
—They are dense with attention to detail and mechanically engaging enemies
—Gliding adds a fun new level of play
—Map metas overall improvement on Scarlet invasion-kitten -SW style lanes
4 Fractals are more accessible
—Rewards and toughness overkill aside (fingers crossed for a timely delivered promise on those), they are much more nicely paced and much more forgiving for new/returning players
5 Raids are fun
—Mostly met expectations for challenging content and mechanical variety
6 And speaking of PvE, condi is viable now!
—For Engie, necro, and warrior at least… maybe mesmer.
7 Welcome new skin diversity
—New armors… somewhat decent
—New tradeable weapons pretty cool
—Last couple of BL weapon skin sets have been top notch
—-Note this is a very subjective opinion

The bad:
1 Nasty profession bugs persist
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/revenant/Revenant-bug-list
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Ranger-bugs-9/page/3
(some of these are embarrassingly old)
2 Legendary journey horribly bugged and imbalanced
—Broken events
—Items gated behind failed events
—Essential items otherwise unobtainable
—Combined value of crafting materials for recipes greater than the price of most precursors on the TP (lol)
3 PvP:
—Matchmaking
—-SoloQ often matched with premades
—-High tiers often matched with low tiers
—Class (im)balance
—-Revenant meta combines high sustain with high number of blocks and evades /and/ high damage, making it difficult to counter for many other classes
—-Reaper pairs nigh-invincibility with high condi damage while gaining easy access to tons of stability, making it difficult to counter for many other classes
—-DH traps, without precast and with low cooldowns allow the spamming of high-damage and high-hard-CC skills that require no effort to use, but can instantly kill many, if not most, builds, often without red indicator rings to provide any warning.
——Effectively, low skill, highest damage/sustain potential
5 WvW
—Seemingly everything
6 Classes in need of major/big love
—Warrior
—Ranger
—Thief
—Daredevil
—Any class which can use both shortbow and dual pistols
—Thief
7 Communication
—Reddit apparently takes priority over GW2’s own forums
—Twitter essentially esports promoter
—What is a two-week period before leagues begin, anyway? Isn’t it just another point of view of the same period of time?
8 Economy
—Where to start
8 Visual nerfs no one asked for
—And you thought the end of the personal story was an anti-climax!
9 But seriously that new campaign
—I’ve chewed pieces of gum that lasted longer, not counting the mastery grinds
10 We paid fifty bucks for this
—I mean come on
—this is definitely not 5/6 the value of GW2 core on release

Let me know if I missed anything.

Plz, speak for yourself. Those lists give the impression to be somewhat consensus, which they are definetly not. E. g. “the good: new maps are sweet”. I’d like to disagree 100% here. Same goes for the new fractals. This list could go on and on, and each and everyone would have a different opinion.
So, sorry I have to say it that way since I see you put a lot of effort and dedication in your posts- this thread is pretty pointless.

Nash.2681:

Plz, speak for yourself. Those lists give the impression to be somewhat consensus, which they are definetly not. E. g. “the good: new maps are sweet”. I’d like to disagree 100% here. Same goes for the new fractals. This list could go on and on, and each and everyone would have a different opinion.
So, sorry I have to say it that way since I see you put a lot of effort and dedication in your posts- this thread is pretty pointless.

Overall, the reaction to the maps, from what I can see, has been:
1. these are really pretty
2. i am confused and these enemies are really hard
3. once i stopped being confused and learned the mechanics i enjoyed myself
4. the events are broken what gives
5. no one will organize this meta

Now, the major problems with the maps have not been so much about the designs themselves, or inherent flaws, but specific points of implementation, bugs and frankly l2p issues, or playerbase participation issues. But if you can point to a specific and commonly held gripe with them, I’m all ears.

As for fractals, what is your problem with them specifically? I’m being optimistic and not putting “crappy rewards and insane toughness” in “bad” because those have been specifically addressed and a fix has been promised.

“fix”

“promised”

“emphasis.”

But overall the major reaction seems to be “this would be fine if not for these problems in execution.” Which is really the overwhelming complaint across the board, just tailored to different aspects of play and content.

Soa Cirri.6012:

Nash.2681:

Plz, speak for yourself. Those lists give the impression to be somewhat consensus, which they are definetly not. E. g. “the good: new maps are sweet”. I’d like to disagree 100% here. Same goes for the new fractals. This list could go on and on, and each and everyone would have a different opinion.
So, sorry I have to say it that way since I see you put a lot of effort and dedication in your posts- this thread is pretty pointless.

Overall, the reaction to the maps, from what I can see, has been:
1. these are really pretty
2. i am confused and these enemies are really hard
3. once i stopped being confused and learned the mechanics i enjoyed myself
4. the events are broken what gives
5. no one will organize this meta

Now, the major problems with the maps have not been so much about the designs themselves, or inherent flaws, but specific points of implementation, bugs and frankly l2p issues, or playerbase participation issues. But if you can point to a specific and commonly held gripe with them, I’m all ears.

As for fractals, what is your problem with them specifically? I’m being optimistic and not putting “crappy rewards and insane toughness” in “bad” because those have been specifically addressed and a fix has been promised.

“fix”

“promised”

“emphasis.”

But overall the major reaction seems to be “this would be fine if not for these problems in execution.” Which is really the overwhelming complaint across the board, just tailored to different aspects of play and content.

That’s the point. All you see is the feedback of a few people. And the more people’s feedback you’d see, the more diverse it would be.
What I dislike about the new fractals? Letting the poor rewards aside (yeah, they said to fix them, but I won’t believe it til I see it), no more randomness, everyone just picks out the fastest/easiest ones to get things done asap. People play each level once for the achievement or to get to lvl 100 and then it’s the same boring routine. Do swamp, do molten duo, do one of the two again, repeat on the next difficulty. Yay.

Nash.2681:

I won’t believe it til I see it

To be clear, this consensus is between the forums, reddit, as well as map chat, guildies, friends. I said freely first off that my estimation is not authoritative, and perhaps this method is somewhat lazy. But there are very strong opinions held by significant numbers of people, and the effect has been mitigated by their dispersion. Even I wasn’t really expecting the “bad” list to be as long as it was until I consolidated the major problems I’d seen reiterated several times across platforms. Granted, it was also padded a bit with semi-serious jokes.

Obviously these all shouldn’t be weighed equally, and I attempted to isolate praise or complaints that are common enough to be worth listing. For example, the disillusionment over the Invisible Shoes is very, very hardcore, but that is also a very, very niche concern.

I’m fairly confident that the randomness of fractals is not something that a lot of people miss. However, I will say that your problem can be easily fixed by finding a group of like-minded people to do fractals with. Nothing is really stopping such a group from doing whichever fractal levels you want to do. If swamp and moltboss aren’t your thing, don’t do them.

Soa Cirri.6012:

Nash.2681:

I won’t believe it til I see it

To be clear, this consensus is between the forums, reddit, as well as map chat, guildies, friends. I said freely first off that my estimation is not authoritative, and perhaps this method is somewhat lazy. But there are very strong opinions held by significant numbers of people, and the effect has been mitigated by their dispersion. Even I wasn’t really expecting the “bad” list to be as long as it was until I consolidated the major problems I’d seen reiterated several times across platforms. Granted, it was also padded a bit with semi-serious jokes.

Obviously these all shouldn’t be weighed equally, and I attempted to isolate praise or complaints that are common enough to be worth listing. For example, the disillusionment over the Invisible Shoes is very, very hardcore, but that is also a very, very niche concern.

I’m fairly confident that the randomness of fractals is not something that a lot of people miss. However, I will say that your problem can be easily fixed by finding a group of like-minded people to do fractals with. Nothing is really stopping such a group from doing whichever fractal levels you want to do. If swamp and moltboss aren’t your thing, don’t do them.

You somehow missed my point (what you quoted was directed to the announced fotm fix, nothing more, nothing less), may be I wrote it unclear, I don’t know. What I tried to say was, that GW2 has millions of players, some of them making statements about what they like or do not like. But you will hardly find something that all, or at least a real majority will agree on, at least not by collecting feedback from the given sources.
There might be topics on this forums with hundreds of replies, most of them being consesus about it. And still, that’s just a few hundreds out of millions. So you simply can’t take it as “the majorities” opinion. All one can do, is try to destilate objective information and constructive feedback.
People are different, people feel different, people focus on different aspects. And that’s why I don’t think this topic provides any benefit, since it’s just listing things some people like/dislike based on opinion.
There are topics in the related subforums about what people think is wrong and should be improved. We got a HoT subforum, a PvP subforum, a WvW subforum, a fractal/raid subforum (RIP Dungeons) and a subforum for each class, I don’t see why all that stuff should be merged together.
In addition, there are other channels where people give feedback, youtube, twitch, reddit, etc. It’s a noble task to try to get them together, but tbh- that’s ANets job.

And a last note to fractals: it has nothing to do wether swamp or molten duo “is my thing”, to me the level randomness was a core feature of fractals that made them somewhat interesting. Now finishing a level is an instant hard stop. Either you proceed to the next level (which is already set in stone) or you quit the lobby and re-open the next level. Either way, you have full control about what comes next, there’s zero moment of surprise to it thus making them pretty boring imo.

Nash.2681:

What I dislike about the new fractals? Letting the poor rewards aside (yeah, they said to fix them, but I won’t believe it til I see it), no more randomness, everyone just picks out the fastest/easiest ones to get things done asap. People play each level once for the achievement or to get to lvl 100 and then it’s the same boring routine. Do swamp, do molten duo, do one of the two again, repeat on the next difficulty. Yay.

I’m really not sure how people started believing that somehow fractal rewards are worse since HoT. I consider myself a fractal-er. It’s my preferred game mode in GW2, I do at least 4 each weekday (that typically takes 45-60min depending on group), weekends I do many more.

So I don’t sound like a complete BSer, last night I did the 2 daily fractals for the pages and the 21-50 daily (do 3 in that range). It took me 47min to do all 4 fractals (believe it was a 4, 21, 25, and 40 we did).

I emptied my inventory before we started and made sure not to deposit collectibles at any time (I do it without thinking out of habit so it took a lot of willpower not to press it haha)

I salvaged all of my rares (6 of them—9 ectos from them 32s/ea or a little under 3g), with exception of one staff worth 50s which I put on TP (and sold within 2min), I salvaged 2 exotics I had gotten (got 1 soldier inscription worth ~2g, the other I got dark matter and an ecto), I salvaged the ascended ring I got (was a duplicate—I spent 1g on the salvage kit here, ended up with 10 stabilizing matrices worth ~43s/ea, so net profit of 3g just on that ring—you can get anywhere from 2-20 matrices from a ring, 20 was the highest I’ve gotten, not sure if others have gotten more), I had gotten 3 matrices from the various achievement chests, sold for 1.2g.

From all of the blues and greens salvaged I had ended up with ~2g worth of materials I listed on TP, that all sold before I had logged out last night.

That’s already over 10g, in 45min, and I didn’t even open my encryptions. I ended up with 14 of them or so.

I also haven’t sold the 65 +1 infusions as I’m saving them up to craft into +8s. But if I were to sell the 65 infusions, it would be worth around 90s.

That’s 47min of playing, and over 11g+ in loot. Obviously your mileage may vary, but my typical average over an hour in fractals is around 10g. Sometimes a bit less, sometimes a bit more, but 10g seems to be a fair average for me. I’m at 150% base MF by the way.

I certainly wasn’t making this money doing just fractals pre-HoT.

The only problem with fractals, IMO, is the stupid low XP you get. I can do 30 fractals and maybe I’ll get a half a bar of XP. It’s stupid. And that’s with celebration booster AND an XP booster. Supposedly they increased the XP you get, but it must have been so marginal that it’s unnoticeable.

Sorry for the long post. As a fractal fan, it pains me to constantly read people talking about how poor fractal rewards are. I think the only people that say that are the ones that don’t actually spend time in fractals. That or people don’t actually think about all of the materials they get from doing it and simply deposit collectibles and then complain they aren’t making money.