Guild Wars 2

I’m playing through the story on a new character (mainly to see the level 60+ bit for myself before it’s fixed) and I came across another issue caused by the new story.

You now witness the reunion of Destiny’s Edge at level 40, just before starting your Order’s storyline. But, if you do the story dungeons when they first become available you do Ascalon Catacombs at level 30 as before.

Which means you get to help Eir and Rytlock work together to retrieve Magdaer for Logan. Then, 10 levels later, you watch Caithe make the first attempt to bring them together and Eir have the idea to do something to fix Rytlock and Logan’s relationship.

I can’t really see a fix for it, short of reverting the story to the previous system or warning players who care about the story to put off the dungeons for 10 levels, but I wanted to see if anyone else had any thoughts on it. Do you think it’s really an issue or could it be ret-conned to still make sense?

If they are going to do anything about it they might as well make AC into a level 40 dungeon. The barter rewards can be put to level 40 for explorable as well. The NPE seems to have slowed down player development and if anyone is worried about new players getting scared away from the game then they should be worried by the AC explorable paths.

I really wish someone on the development team was on top of the analysis of the design changes. The impact of change often seems to be underestimated and not fully controlled.

It also creates a discrepency with the letters sent to you throughout the personal story.

If I were them, I’d set all explorable modes to be level 80 (rebalanced of course) – this would give a better sense of end game via dungeons, create an ease of cross-dungeon balance in both difficulty and reward, and give sense to how the primary reward for a level 35 dungeon is level 80 exotics. Then I’d set up the story mode to be every 5 levels, going down from 80 with Arah. Thus:

80: Arah
75: HotW
70: CoE
65: CoF
60: SE
55: TA
50: CM
45: AC

This does make a slight level issue with HotW, and a bigger one with CoF, but with the entrances to both being easy to reach or always open (respectively), and most players not going to them at the recommended level, it’s not as big of an issue as the current story mess.

But they said they’re not really going to be touching the dungeons, so… shrug Opportunity lost, story confused.