Guild Wars 2

I would like to take a moment to say that the living story over the course of season 2 has been a vast improvement over previous content and I am glad to see Anet taking in many of the suggestions made by players. However there are many improvements that the game still needs.

The Good

• The process of obtaining the new backpiece Mysterious Vine/Mawdrey through doing a variety of content to craft it is vastly preferable to RNGsus drops and gemstore acquisition. The same goes for the ambrite weapons. I personally had a good amount of fun hunting for chests while exploring dry top. Hopefully this was a test to see if the same could be applied to the supposed precursor rework.
• Modrem enemies and other various enemies such as the giant beetles in dry top have new mechanics that differ from your standard mob where you could just stand there wail on them with almost no repercussion. New enemies such as the modrem thrasher and giant beetle reward good positioning and modrem husks seem like an attempt to make condition builds more viable.
• The new zone Dry Top is a great area that makes good use of the Z-axis. It is a enjoyable experience to explore the area and find things such as lost coins and buried chests during sandstorms. The area is beautifully designed and stands out as one of the best desert areas I have seen in games.
• [Minor spoilers] The story of season 2 is a big improvement and has its moments. In particular I found story missions involving taimi and the pale tree to be quite good. Taimi while trying to show that she can be strong and capable like the other heroes shows that she is still a child and is vulnerable at times. The missions involving Omadd’s machine and the pale tree are extremely cool and link together things from the lore and scarlett’s journals.
• [Minor spoilers] The inclusion of cinematic cutscenes within the story such as the pale tree’s vision and omadd’s machine cinematics were simply awesome and conveyed points that could never have been presentable using cutscenes made from the game engine.
• The introduction of a BLOODSTONE SINK. No longer will people have piles and piles of bloodstone dust clogging up banks and inventories. The item Mawdrey II consumes bloodstone dust and spits out items in return.
• The introduction of the story journal. One of the biggest complaints was that once a living story episode was done, it could not be accessed again. The story journal rectifies this issue and makes it so that players can play any episode the want at any time.

The Bad

• Linking world events to the living story while being cool in concept did not pan out well in in practice and led to problems such as players being unable to advance their story because a world event was stuck.
• Crafting the new ambrite weapons and the Mawdrey backpiece was fun and definitely a step in the right direction. However the drop rate of fossilized insects from chests was still too low and for some people took upwards of 50 chests to obtain one.
• The hunt for foxfire clusters. This is not fun at all. It is extremely boring and somewhat frustrating to go and run around and farm trees for hours praying to RNGsus that a cluster would drop from a tree.
• Rewards are somewhat unbalanced for certain activities. In particular the legendary sand giant is rarely ever killed as it is inefficient to do so compared to other activities during the sandstorm. This is a shame as the giant does have cool mechanics to it. In my opinion harder bosses such as three-toed-tootsie and the legendary sand giant should give better rewards than your standard champion box such as unique items and drops.

The Ugly

• The biggest thing I noticed that was missing from season 2 content was the lack of coordinated group activites, in particular group instances such as dungeons. This is an MMO after all, group content should be emphasized otherwise it might as well be another single player RPG. Single player instances can be fun but in my opinion should not the be focus of an MMO. Open world events lack the intimacy and teamwork that group instances carry. All too often world bosses degenerate into masses of people spamming 1 until the boss dies with no teamwork involved. However, there are notable exceptions such as three-toed-tootsie which require decent amounts of teamwork to prevent failure. Hopefully Anet has some group instances/dungeons/fractals planned for the future and that they will avoid the mistakes made with dungeons such as the aetherblade path in twilight arbor.

i agree with all your good points so no discussion there.

i think they will get better with the linking or making of world event in the ls and hope they try different things in the future and keep at it til they get it right. i like how they try to relate stuff in the ls to event you have in the world. plus if i do the ls with an alt i like how i might complete events chains that i wouldnt have otherwise. the drops and rewards you are right with all that.

only other comment i got i think a dungeon is going to come at some time during the season. they only did part of the season. im hoping they release a dungeon and world dragon event with every ls season. im hoping that something along the line of marionette(not sure if that spelled right) becomes a the permanent thing . if they dont release stuff like this then im going to totally agree with you on this point

I find it incredibly dull and hope we get a meaningful event soon.

yeah I would of loved some kind of epic dungeon. But then again if you’ve played wow you could wait 9-12months for new dungeon so mayeb one is one the way. I wouldn’t expect them to spew out one every couple of chapters.

I agree with most of your points. Minor quibble with the bloodstone sink, though. I have zero interest in dumping a bunch of time and materials into the back item. I still would like to have access to a bloodstone sink. It’s like adding a vendor somewhere that will only deal with you if you’ve made a legendary. For some folks that’s fine, but not everyone wants to make a legendary just to have access to that vendor. It’s not a huge deal, but mildly irritating if I don’t have any plans to make the back piece.

I also don’t really agree with the preference shown between open world and dungeons. I far prefer open world content (assuming it’s not glitchy and stalled like… some events). As I understand it, the instances for the Living Story did scale up with additional party members, so I have no complaints for that. However that’s a subjective opinion, and I really don’t know how well these instances scale (since I completed them all solo).

Scavenger hunting is fun, but I hope it won’t be so easy to craft a precursor. If everyone had a legendary because it was so easily obtainable, some players might feel that it wasn’t as special or meaningful anymore.

It’s great that they put in a bloodstone dust sink, but I feel like a better sink for those, and the other ascended crafting materials, would be the same way they handled fine/masterwork equipment with luck/magic find- allow these excess materials to contribute towards permanently increasing gold gain, experience gain, or karma gain.

Seems like ANet really took all the pointless ranting seriously and are now surfing across forums and sites, responding

It’s cool guys, you don’t have to sign up everywhere, all we want is to not lose you again after two weeks. Cheers!

Wonderly.1324:

Scavenger hunting is fun, but I hope it won’t be so easy to craft a precursor. If everyone had a legendary because it was so easily obtainable, some players might feel that it wasn’t as special or meaningful anymore.

It’s great that they put in a bloodstone dust sink, but I feel like a better sink for those, and the other ascended crafting materials, would be the same way they handled fine/masterwork equipment with luck/magic find- allow these excess materials to contribute towards permanently increasing gold gain, experience gain, or karma gain.

You are forgetting the time gated part.
For example
700 Plate of Meaty Plant Food
700 Plate of Piquant Plant Food
100 Clay Pots
Not particularly challenging but not easy either.

Another sink for bloodstone dust(need one for dragonite too … even junk loot has more value than these ascended crafting materials right now) is nice but the implementation falls short.

The bad:

A) Taimi is incredibly annoying. She’s too stereo-typically Asuran. This happens with several of your characters (refer to point B about Norns). She should have a side to her that’s more than “I’m so smart and obsessed with Scarlet’s work, and I’m so misunderstood by all the idiots around me.”

B) I get that Brahm is a Norn, but does he constantly have to be portrayed as being an idiot that only knows how to swing a mace and destroy things? It seems like this is done for every Norn in the game except for Eir. His mom is interesting and not totally linear. Why should he be?

C) The writing for the conversations is terrible. I have a hard time caring about any of these characters because their lines make me feel like I am listening to people LARPing instead of being told an interesting story. This mainly applies to the two ladies in the group. Every other word out of their mouth doesn’t have to be about how deeply they are in love with each other. It really takes away from the story and the current events at hand. It would be okay if it’s from time to time. However, when those two are together, that’s practically all they talk about.

The good:

I like that you added fun, difficult, single-player achievements. That’s really the only thing I like about Living World. If it weren’t for these, then I wouldn’t play at all because I find this content to be some of the worst content I’ve played in any online game.