Hello, forum-people. I’ve been a long time fan of Guild Wars series, dating back to the golden times of the original game
Yet, this is my first time ever posting to the forums. I feel like wanting to share my two cents about the current state of the game, and my hopes for the future.
HoT was certainly different from the core game. I’m all for that, good to try new things! The new maps took some time to get used to, and with time, I even begun to like Tangled Depths. Yes, I first considered TD to be THE worst map ever, but now I actually consider it my favorite out of the HoT maps. I guess you could say I learned the ways of the jungle, heh.
Adventures are certainly a nice addition to the game, but that kinda brings me to the thing that I’m not so much a fan of. The waiting game. You wait for many things lately. For the right time to play adventures, for certains events to pop for your collections, for the right time to kill a certain boss. Sometimes, it feels the game is playing me, more than I’m playing it. Let’s take the collections. I love the idea of collections. I like collecting things. It’s great to finally have the precursor hunt in the game. Sadly, I find some parts, that require you to complete events, rather boring. It’s fine, if the event is up a lot. But if not, and it kinda requires you to afk in place for hours on end, waiting for something to happen, that’s a bit irritating. I would rather use my playing time for actually playing. When GW2 launched, events were nice, exciting, spontaneous things happening at the maps, which made the world feel alive. You could hop right in for exp and loots, and have fun doing it. With some collections requiring events to complete, that kinda makes the events a double-edged sword for me. I feel the original dynamic idea of events is lost, when you have to check wiki for event chains, and wait for them.
With the recent HoT maps, GW2 is very much “on the clock”. I find myself constantly checking external timers for the state of the maps, and, of course, the ever trusty world boss timer. “Aah, the assault on Tarir is already half underway, no use going there anymore” or “Aww, I missed Shatterer again, maybe I should set up an alarm for the next time”.
Well, timed content is alright with me, as long as there is enough content that I can do exactly when I want to do it. Now, that content would probably be the personal/living story for me. I very much like the story and the achievements associated with them. Can’t wait for LW S3 to begin. Story is also nice, because it’s something that I can do alone. It’s very relaxing. Thanks to my nice guild, I can also run fractals when I want to (usually daily) and raids (although we have only killed VG, but let it not be said we dont try our best at Gorse. Bless our poor souls). The meta-events on HoT maps I find rather time-consuming, and a bit grindy… Don’t get me wrong, I actually like all of them, but I don’t find the energy in myself to play them daily.
Personally, I find a need for more things to do when you want to, without the need for waiting. When I pondered what that content could be, an idea came to me. I find it a huge shame, when anet nerfed dungeon rewards so badly, that barely any people play them anymore. A lot of time and effort went into making of dungeons, and while some people speculate they could be salvaged as fractals (which is nice too), I came up with a different idea. Heroes. For those not familiar with original Guild Wars, heroes were AI-controlled helpers, which you could customize to your liking. Attributes, skills, even cosmetics to some extent. And hey, they actually did pretty good job! A part of the fun was making up working team compositions with your heroes, and the game was totally “soloable” with the help of your heroes. Now, I’m not saying we should have heroes running behind every player in GW2, or try to make all content in GW2 soloable. I’m proposing the adding of heroes to dungeons. That way, you could “easily” run dungeons even solo, or duo with a friend or spouse, with the rest of the party being ever faithful heroes, doing their job silently. I guess that could also appease the part of the player base, who don’t much care for grouping, and prefer to play solo. With hero-system, I would also love small “quests” you have to do, to actually acquire the heroes. Also, would be nice of them to hang around your home instance too. Poor home instance. I really hope it gets revived at some point. But back to the point. Now, why would anyone want to run dungeons anymore, solo or not? Well, dungeon tokens are still very much “needed”, and I find it silly to have to complete pvp reward tracks to acquire skins with very strong ties to PvE. Also, as gold rewards are out of the question, how about something else…. how about collection rewards! Guild hall trophies! Hero skins! All kinds of stuff that doesn’t have gold value. I would personally like that kind of a system a lot, but what do you guys think?
As for future, maybe thinking about the next expansion, I hope for something different than HoT. HoT was fine, but I hope the next x-pack could be a little bit less hectic, a bit less grindy. I had no feeling of grind with masteries at any point, they came at their own time, I didn’t worry about exp. At the moment, I find myself with full mastery points, but a lot of map currencies left to earn, to be able to buy all the stuff I want. Well, I ain’t out of the jungle for some time yet :P
Thanks (and salutations) for reading through!
