[Warning, lots of text ahead. If you are afraid of text, please turn back now!]
So I’m thinking about coming back to the game and I was wondering if any of the issues that led me away from the game have been improved upon. First off, I loved Guild Wars 1 and spent a bajillion hours on that game, got the GWAMM and all of that jazz. I started out Guild Wars 2 from day 1 and played it for a couple of months before growing tired of it for various reasons and moving on. After being disappointed by so many other games recently and getting a new computer that is able to make GW2 much more lively, I’ve been thinking about making a comeback.
Before I mention the negative, let me first say a few things I love about Guild Wars 2. I love the player characters, especially the Asura. I love the world (even Orr with its annoying grabbing undead grew on me eventually). I love the map and exploring everything. I like a lot of the events even though many are very unpopulated. I do like the armor and weapon skins that I have been able to view but not obtain. I love how GW2 finally added a 3D feel to the game with added jumping and other activities.
I really want to enjoy this game as much as I enjoyed GW1 but there were a few glaring issues I had on my first go around. I was wondering if any of these issues have been improved on.
1. Groups. I grew very frustrated with the lack of a grouping feature. The prospect of spamming “LFG” in various towns for the slim prospect of finding a group was very unappealing for me and I hardly ever engaged in it. As such, I never was able to find a single group to clear a single dungeon (apart from Arah Story) which was a shame since there were several armors I would have liked to see on my characters.
Has finding groups improved at all? Is there a more standardized grouping area or better yet a new menu that lists people looking for groups?
2. Dungeons. They all seemed designed to punish people without twitch skills. Each boss would one-shot you into oblivion if you failed to react to that one second tell that probably wasn’t very obvious to begin with. Or you simply had a one second lag and died anyways. I don’t play FPS games because I’d be shot before my hands would ever find the correct key to press. I can learn strategy but I can’t learn twitch. Super speed is just not something I am capable of and unfortunately that combined with grouping woes made the only viable repeating content unavailable to me. In Guild Wars if a mission troubled you, you could still load up Henchmen or Heroes and try try try again until you finally got it right. Grind out a victory if you had to. In Guild Wars 2 there was no grind. You play flawless or you fail. One hour to form a group, then 2 minutes to one-shot a person who then leaves and ends the run.
Are dungeons still as unforgiving? Do people still run the older ones (if new ones exist)?
3. Guilds. It seems like most games have this problem. They set up a system for players to band together and form guilds, but there’s no effective means of finding like-minded players. There’s no central recruiting area or an in-game menu to advertise on. It’s just the same old “JOIN MY GUILD NOW!!!!” spam in random towns. Almost every game I play does this. This leads to joining tons of garbage guilds full of people who don’t participate or respect each other.
Has there been any improvements to Guilds and Guild finding?
4. Know-Everything or Go Away. This kind of lfm is common in every game and I’m wondering if I played again if it would even be possible to get into any group given my glaring lack of dungeon abilities. The only people who post lots of groups already know the content and almost never want to let anyone else in who doesn’t. It might be too late now.
A few more random questions…Do people still farm the same events (like say oh…Cursed Shore) over and over and over and over? Are there any more new zones besides Southsun? Does missing any bonus live events over the past several months put me at a disadvantage? Are the levels 1-79 zones still ghost towns? Are there still issues with mobs going invulnerable for all manner of silly reasons? How many licks does it take to get to the center of a tootsie pop?