Guild Wars 2

Greetings fellow players and, hopefully, ANET developers,

I want to say that I am personally extremely satisfied with the game as a whole. There are some things that I don’t like but overall my playgroup is having a blast! Thank you for that. I wanted to make a post regarding what we like most about the game and things that, we feel, need improvement; specific as I can in this regard. Again, thank you for your hard work.

HoT Maps/Meta Events
We found the maps to pretty amazing in HoT. The scale, events, vertical-ness, and scope of these events all culminate into a meta event which makes sense. We truly enjoyed these maps and events. We felt as though the Mastery Points added entertainment and value to the expansion as well; more on this later. These maps truly provided months of fun.

We loved everything about the maps and meta events in HoT. However, I really would like to dive-in and possibly explain how this can be expanded upon. The primary issue with these events is that they are not very dynamic; don’t change much and can appear/feel repetitive.

I think there can be events that cycle through different types of meta events for different outcomes; triggers for a different meta. For example, failing a meta event would spin-off a different series of events. I think this continual arc would be beneficial to feeling fresh.

Elite Specs
I think Elite Specs were/are a great idea but the amount of power some of these specializations provided were too much. In many cases, they disrupted the PVP scenes and even the raiding scene. The power granted to elite specializations needs to be tuned and examined for future expansion.

Long term character advancement
We believe that the mastery system didn’t provide enough direct character progression in the long-run. The mastery system is really cool for map-specific functions but very lackluster in furthering advancement of our chosen characters. Perhaps this is a misconception as the game is very “alt” friendly; playing multiple professions is encouraged. However, my play group tends to just master one character and only play that one.

We believe that many of the trait lines for most of the professions need work. There are some trait lines that are completely broken with, in addition, multiple skills that either don’t work, are completely ineffective, or lack of synergy with trait-lines. I think long-term character development and the previous statement are what this great game suffers from the most.

Key Moments/Memories
- Stepping foot into Maguuma for the first time was an amazing feeling. The verticality of it all. However, what really made it fun was the scale in difficulty from the core game. We were craving something incredibly more difficult in the open world and this was the start of what provided it.
- Earning my Elite Specialization (Scrapper) loved the concept, despite some of the boring lackluster traits.
- Raiding for the first time was a pretty sweet experience. I have a very difficult time getting groups but that seems to be 1.) my fault for not trying hard enough and 2.) engineer stigma
- Creating my legendary hammer was an amazing experience. The collections were really cool to get through even though I felt it was anticlimactic; ultimately had to goto the wiki to figure out how to finish the weapon.
- PvP has provided my group with loads of fun (unranked).
- WvW has been a hit or miss for us. We, generally, found the maps to be too large and not very enjoyable even in the zergs.
- Obtaining our guild hall was a great experience for four of us. We managed to get it on our own which was a big deal considering the difficulty.
- Getting to the end of Dragon’s Stand for the first time.

I will update this post once I have some more time. I just wanted to get my thoughts out there.

I thought the storyline introduction to the open world map Verdant Brink was just awesome. You see what happens to the pact fleet and then, there it is in open world format for you to dive right in! This was truly a high point for a storyline that was otherwise pretty lackluster, in my opinion.

To me, it is only the fact that the original 4 HoT maps were of such excellent quality that excused there being so few of them. And with the exception of bloodstone fen, I have been pretty disappointed with the map design since then. I know they’re pushing a pretty fast release schedule for these and they’re trying to do somewhat to appease players who truly disliked the original HoT maps, but Ember Bay and Bitterfrost Frontier really lack most of what I loved about HoT to begin with.

I also enjoyed the mastery system, but much of it feels irrelevant. An example of a really good mastery line was gliding. It added useful skills that also served as a time gate. An example of a bad mastery was Itzel poison lore, the sole purpose of which was as a time gate. Skills like this add nothing to the gameplay, yet force us to waste our time earning them to progress. I hope in the next expansion they will find ways of introducing more relevant masteries and do away with pointless time gating.

Having said that, I do feel that I need more reasons to keep playing. I just don’t want them to feel like they’re contrived solely for the purpose of wasting my time. I should want to unlock these skills because, like gliding, they represent fun and useful additions to the gameplay. Not because I can’t not unlock them and continue the storyline while they don’t actually do anything for me (Itzel poison lore).

As for elite specs, I don’t PvP so I’m not feeling the urgency. It seems clear that elite specs are more powerful, but I expect more such specs will be released in the future and that they’ll probably be mutually exclusive such that players are forced to choose from several elite options. I’m not sure how I’ll feel about that until I see it, but in general I agree that balance is good and these specs are not balanced!