Guild Wars 2

So I heard about the recent feature patch, figured it was time to dust off Guild Wars 2 and give it another whirl. I have tried over the last few days and once again I just don’t seem to be able to get into this game; here are some of my thoughts.

I decided to start from scratch since it’s been so long and so much has changed that I may as well learn it over again… now here is my honest take on this games levelling. The amount of character depth and progression in this game does not, in anyway, shape or form require 80 levels. Half of that, at 40, would be a stretch.

You learn weapon skills nearly instantly. There aren’t that many weapons to pick from. There is no depth what so ever in the weapon/skill system in this game, no room for customization beyond equipping one of the few other weapon types. There is perhaps at most 20 levels worth of getting to grips with weapon types. It’s just not an interesting system and any improved customization here would be a huge improvement to this game.

This new lvl30+ trait business is just a complete mystery to me. I can’t even begin to comprehend why you think levelling progression, which up until level 30 is basically swapping a couple of bits of gear for 1-2 extra stat points here and there and unlocking weapon skills, justifies this delay in furthering your character in a more meaningful fashion… this is beyond awful. You have 14 traits? then you don’t need 80 levels and the horrifically long arbitrary gating of attaining those traits. Between 14 traits and a the un-interesting weapon system you probably have in the region of 20-30 levels worth of character progression on the way up. Everything else is filler at best. Your filler to progression ratio is absurd.

The mega-server system is a double-edged sword. Now on the one hand, yay, busy zones and lot’s of events and things happening. But it highlights just how poor parts of this game really are and magnifies them in quite a depressing way. First of all, all events in this game, are zerg fests. Everything just get’s nuked down by overwhelming numbers of players, to which any one player is utterly insignificant in every way imaginable. I do think not having a trinity isn’t necessarily bad, but right now Guild Wars 2 is not even beginning to offer the alternative to the trinity in terms of content, nothing is particularly challenging, none of it scales with the numbers of players around and content should still make the individual feel like there is a role for them to play.

Then onto the flow of events themselves… there are a couple of zones in this game that offer zone wide events which lend themselves nicely to megaserver (zerging aside)… however in the vast majority of zones you have small, very local chains of a couple of events which leads to the player numbers of mega-servers essentially being in a constant state of feeling like a whole bunch of random crap going on without rhyme nor reason. Perhaps that could be solved with increasing the challenge and scaling of the content in those, but I’d prefer all zones to be encapsulated in huge event chains that you can really get into whilst there.

Some other things have bothered me since launch that are still present in the game so I’ll just list them:

o Why are nameplates STILL not scaling with distance? why is some one stood 10 metres away’s nameplate the exact same size as someone stood 100 metres away? as soon as you have a lot of players on screen it just becomes a horrific cluttered mess.

o Whilst you’re at that make critters and neutrals a separate class of nameplate that can be filtered as turning on all enemies and seeing all neutrals or turning on all friendlies and seeing nameplates for rabbits and cats isn’t great with the clutter issue.

o Conditions… been a mess since day one. The bleed limit? various other stacking issues? the relative power? the PvP situation with them? is it even on the radar to redesign these things? they need it.

o Pretty much any stats that aren’t full zerk; buff them.

So, I hope this wasn’t too much of a rant. Like I stated in my last thread, this is a really great game that I really, really want to get into. I will keep tabs on the updates and give this another try for sure when I see some significant changes, I hope the next time I will be met with something that keeps me playing however.

Thanks all.

Oh and I forgot to put in this, but the original thread was about skill lag – it feels a bit improved but it’s still very much there… as soon as anything interesting happens in game and a squillion people turn up it just becomes unplayable. I’ve always wanted to get into WvW for instance, but It’s either roaming, in which I may as well just do SPvP instead. Or zerging, in which I stand in a huge crowd watching my abilities not go off for seconds at a time. Not a fun experiences on any level.

Peace op, see ya around at the “next big whoop” anet gives us.

I think the skill system depends mostly on what class you play. You may be a very fast learner, but I think you might be playing the wrong profession. As an elementalist, I have been discovering skill combo’s and am still discovering them over the past ~2 years. However, the warrior skills feel very generic and boring. There is very little depth to the warrior skills, and a lot of depth to ele skills. So this issue may be fixed easily for you?