Guild Wars 2

I’m trying to do a constructive thread here. It’s so unlike me.

PVE
Best: Breakbar. This is awesome. This also applies to every game mode, which makes it even more awesome. Hands down the best addition to the expansion.
Worst: Limitations on gliding. I’m sure there’s dozens of threads where people want to glide in Tyria and the new boarderlands in WvW.

Raids
Best: The fact that raids are a thing. LoL. New challenges are fun. My guildies love that this is a challenge that the entirety of the game has to get better at right now. Although, at this point, a lot have been clearing the raid on a regular basis.
Worst: N/A There is no worst from my perspective. Just waiting on more things added onto the raid, even though I have only cleared the first boss.

WvW
Best: Breakbars on champs make defending a little bit easier.
Worst: Traversing new boardlands takes too long for both enemy and defender (the waypoints often never work on side keeps.) I really think that we should be able to at least glide from certain cliffs. It would allow for knocking people out of the air, which is great!

Spvp (aka esports)
Best: Leagues. This is another new element to competitive play with the pip system.
Worst: Parties vs solos Getting paired with full pug vs a guild group is kind of B.S.

RP
I got nothing for this catagory. Oh, I’m a charr, so “meow!”

Best PvE – Gliding in all it’s forms. By far my favorite addition to the game. Love the design of the new maps too.

Worst PvE – Harder for casual players to come in and get stuff done in HoT. The amount of commitment needed for the game is higher now than it’s ever been.

Breakbars
Best: Everyone can contribute to create a 5-second stun on a boss without Ice Bow.
Worst: All soft CC and some debuff effects are not applied in the slightest.

Elite Specs
Best: New weapons, skills, and traits to play with.
Worst: Power creeps in most of them.

Masteries
Best: Gliding.
Worst: Most masteries feel unrewarding and made-up at the last minute. Progression of disciplines are shallow at best.

Raids
Best: Challenging PvE content.
Worst: Weekly cap and boss rewards are still littered with greens & blues.

Breakbars
Best: Easier for new players to understand.
Worst: Oversimplified CC mechanics into spamming CCs at the right moment.

Elite Specs
Best: Same as Wondrouswall
Worst: Unfair distribution of development resources across the classes.

Masteries
Best: Gliding
Worst: Similair to Wondrouswall again, some masteries are quite useless. Take for example the Exalted gathering, solely implemented to get 1 material for your elite spec collection.

Raids
Best: ??
Worst: Getting 10 players together.

PvE
Best: raids are cool.
Worst: HP pools and boated trash mobs.

Best: Elite specializations, gliding, new enemy behaviours, those breakbars, the models and animations of everything new (especially the frog people). All great and more.

Worst: I just don’t have the energy to make that list. It’s all small stuff too, but small stuff that plays a big part in how it ‘feels’ to play the game.

On the raid side, I think the worst part is that they just threw 3 reskinned bosses in a row.

In WoW raids like Hijal or the Culling of Stratholme gave us great insight into the story giving it depth to certain NPCs. GW2 had every opportunity to do this, tying it to someone(s) from Destiny’s Edge or Braham, yet they just spit out the Thaumanova fractal boss in a prism of colors.

Could be a non-issue to some, but to some of us playing the game from the start, it seems like a fail.

PVE. I would not say it the best as there a lot I like but I must give kudos to the soundtrack. There are just too many favorite pieces to name but this adds greatly to gameplay.

It a lot of those little things like that frog playing the guitar in verdant bring that add value to the game.

Best: Beautiful maps, great music, fun gliding

Worst: Non-soloable HCs, long event chains dependent on time schedules, constant taxiing, map completion items being dependent on group events succeeding.

PvE-Maps/Events:

BEST: Gliding, Design of the Maps (I really like the new maps)

WORST: The events on a time-schedule and the megaserver do not work well together. Empty maps (if you are not at the right time in the right map AND use the LFG-tool) where you can not finish events is one of my worst experiences in this game. Yes, the megaserver problems existed before HoT, but the long HoT-event-timers and the “HoT-group-content” make it worse.

HoT………

Best………. Gliding.
Worst…… Stupid “Adventures”.

PvE:
The good: The elite specs give the old professions at least a bit of fresh air, not counting Healbotruid. Soundtrack looks to be nice.

The bad: 1) Mastery. Laugh at me as you want, but even as a mere level 2 in mastery I’m already terribly bored with trying to fill the experience bar as the only real way in Maguuma lies in doing events, over events, over events, over e…. snooze. Same in Tyria. I have 11 matery points I cannot use because I need to fill first the stupid experience bar.
2) Events/“mega” events: I don’t mind them but to have them as the only content form in the zone is unfortunately not my cup of tea. I only bothered with Orr in normal-GW2 due to the story missions.

‘Nuff said: I enjoy leveling my remaining characters trhough maps I’ve already done at least trice more than exploring the new HoT-maps. Don’t worry though, I’m sure there’s nothing wrong with the game but with my mindset instead!

Regarding HoT:

Best
Gliding is way fun. It should be implemented across game maps. I don’t want to hear how hard this is. If it was easy we’d ask the janitor to do it.

Worst
The Meta. I find the constant lock step in serving the mighty Meta to be totally immersion breaking. From map wide announcements to timed events it turns the game into a project management job. I play to get away from project management.

Masteries. They start kinda fun then become a total mystery grind. Right now I’m putting exp into stuff I don’t know if I even care about it. Adding in mastery points to further wall off content, etc is obviously to soak up players time.

Adventures. There is nothing adventuresome about a bunch on low grade mini-games. My expectation was for a random quest/dungeon generator that would provide us with unlimited adventures and fun.

Flashing Yellow Bar. God I hate that thing. Especially when I’m in Cursed Shore and I don’t care about them enough to go get the points to make it stop. It’s turned into the Guild Wars version of Clippy.

In all, the whole HoT release has been a wet firecracker for me. Not at all what I was expecting. To make matters worse it gets boring really really fast. What happened to the fun factor?