Guild Wars 2

I want to know what piece of the puzzle I am missing here. So far, I am very disappointed in the LS Content. My personal story was great, very fun to complete. and had a nice ending in Arah. I was looking forward to doing LS content on my Warrior after the epic ending.

Started the story, payed for the missed episodes, and thought I was ready to go, but oh boy… Where do I even start.

1. Thrown into a story where I have no idea what is going on. Season 1 is no available and my only outlet is Youtube and Wikis. It lacks the polish of the original game. I have suddenly become the silent protagonist.

2. Sharp difficulty increase. I’ll admit, leveling did seem a little easy, but the spike in difficulty I am experiencing is ridiculous. Every time I turn around there are more veteran mobs, conditions and crowd control everywhere. Melee combat against some mobs is downright impossible. Even after trying multiple builds and doing research.

3. Frustrating mechanics. I don’t know about anyone else here, but I find Dry Top very frustrating. Crystals don’t seem to work as intended sometimes. Sandstorms makes some areas downright annoying to get through, and if the quest NPC is currently in an event, you have to finish the event or wait to continue the storyline.

4. Bugs, lots of them, and from what I can tell, they’ve been around for a long time. The one incident that really bugged me was “Trouble at Fort Salma.” Reviving the squad frequently broke the quest, and since the game lacks an “exit instance button” in the LS it was very irritating to start over. The final boss fight of this quest also presented frustration as the friendly NPCs would frequently reset and don’t get me started on defending the minions.

I’ve pretty much given up on progression at this point. Dungeons were fun, WvW was okay, but if I can’t really enjoy the “new” content, what’s the point. I really expected more from ANet. Now I’m sorry I spent the gems to unlock the useless broken story.

You made some interesting points, but the season is neither useless or broken no matter what point of view you have on the season. That is just an unhelpful comment which will cause the devs to ignore any of your feedback.

In terms of the difficulty, the style of story, the lack of cutscenes, the mechanics, this stems from community feedback from what they didnt like about the personal story and season 1.

Season one wasnt designed to be replayed. A flaw they learned from, but whats done is done, but i appreciate the frustration for new playets.

The personal story was considered by the community as very mixed, in quality and generally speaking, many really disliked Arah in the final episode, so the devs changed the way they made future episodes in season 2.

Has it worked? Well, its an improvement vastly i think, although it is starting to stutter with the overuse of cliffhangers and inconsistent pacing. Believe me, be glad you missed season ones story, ypu really would have hated based on what you said above.

Hope that at least provides some context for why things are as they are at this point.

Hi there.

1. Yeah, I also joined the game in late Season 1 during the Tower of Nightmares event.

It was pretty difficult to get all the information to form a coherent story. BUT I will say this, its VERY much worth it to find out more.
There are some videos and other content you can check to get an overview.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=liUBhhD1Q_M

Little gap in story, the attack on LA, then :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nH2JGRkopyA&list=UUP_FgMqOxp_VsM0UfrL-DxA

A timeline on the wiki, you can obviously follow the links for more info.
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Timeline

The story really is worth researching and caching up on.

2. Difficulty is there for a reason, its level 80 content, so everything is up to snuff.
Condis are easy enough to deal with but you HAVE to spec for them with utilities and traits.
Also getting level 80exotic gear is kind of a must for any level 80 content.
Finally what class and build are you running?
The new content is SUPPOSED to be difficult for glass cannon builds because Anet is trying to encourage more build diversity.

3. Yeah crystals are buggy, especially if your ping is higher than 100ms.
Sandstorm mechanic is intentionally limiting. Story and events are tied together from LW season 2. They are trying to avoid instancing, which most people agree with as it adds “world scope” and a bit better immersion.

4. Its an MMO, things break, especially in GW2 because they update and make changes so often. If you find a problem, report it via the ingame bug report and hope that it works after going in again.

So yeah, I REALLY would like to encourage you to play it through, its really worth it if you can invest yourself in the story.

Breidr.9830:

snip*

I really enjoy the Living Story, half of it. I enjoy the personal story instanced part of it, and ignore the zone,achievement, farm content afterwords. It’s far more enjoyable that way, for me.

Login during a new episode and get it for free. For s2 I knocked it all out (start to previous episode) in about 4h taking my time, & method above.

You’re not the only one who’s finding the difficulty spike very annoying. I think it was caused because a small group of players complained about how ‘easy’ PvE is. Instead of going off to dungeons, fractals, WvW or PvP, they wanted to make PvE harder for the rest of us. I don’t think it was a good decision by ANet.

If this trend continues, I’m probably going to ignore LS updates. Having NPCs bug out and stand there leaving me to fight off hordes of powerful mobs isn’t fun. I’ve had bugs in most LS instances, Fort Salma was very irritating. Why should I spend so much time and effort on things that are broken and not fun?

For the story – ANet storywriting is mediocre. If I’d paid for the LS updates I’d feel ripped off to.

Dry Top is very hard to navigate. The vertical design is interesting the first few times, but it makes getting places hard. The hard mobs mean the exploring is difficult. I can’t take the time to pay attention to the scenery, I always have to be on the lookout for mobs spawning. That’s very frustrating for me, because I think Tyria is beautiful and I want to be able to take time to look at it.

Silverwastes is a bit better to navigate, but it can still be difficult. I hope they make better maps going forward.

I wish ANet wouldn’t keep shoving LS/PS in our faces with the UI – I really like the map completion guide, but I can’t figure out how to have just that and not the achievement tracker and LS tracker.

Gilosean.3805:

I wish ANet wouldn’t keep shoving LS/PS in our faces with the UI – I really like the map completion guide, but I can’t figure out how to have just that and not the achievement tracker and LS tracker.

LS tracker and map completion guide are tied in with each other, and you can choose what to display in the user interface section of the options page. Unfortunately, whe wiki page is not up to date, but if you check your options in-game, you will find a setting for “content direction guide” (or something similar) right above the settings for the in-game clock I think. You can set it to map completion mode if you don’t want the personal/living story to show up, or turn it off completely.

The achievement tracker can’t be turned off (as far as I know), but you can use a work-around to minimize it. Just choose a single achievement (preferably one that you are in no danger of completing any time soon), and put that on your watch list (the eye symbol in the achievement panel). That way, the achievement tracker will only show what’s on your watch list, which in this case is just a single achievement, which minimizes the room on the UI taken over by the tracker.

Whelp, I’m offically giving up on LS content, it’s just not enjoyable. They’ve replaced all of the nicce dialogue sequencces with text cchats and turned gathering NPC into a crappy novel. Go talk to Tiami. Now go get Eir. Oh, Ritlock too.

While your at it can you go cleanse the foefire. Oh, you wanted to DPS that statue and finish the quest, allow me to spawn 100 menders so you have to DPS them instead. This just reeks of poor design choices all around. Sometimes it’s not engaging or hard, it’s just down right stupid.

[quote=4589074;Gilosean.3805:]

And yet, here I am, fully enjoying the story and thinking its even better and funner than the whole Zhaitan thing (level 50+)…

Gilosean.3805:

You’re not the only one who’s finding the difficulty spike very annoying. I think it was caused because a small group of players complained about how ‘easy’ PvE is. Instead of going off to dungeons, fractals, WvW or PvP, they wanted to make PvE harder for the rest of us. I don’t think it was a good decision by ANet.

The game is designed around SPvP where player skill and builds should create big disparities between novice and experienced players. However this disparity also exists in PvE where novice players cannot achieve the same things as experienced players. ANets solution for this is exactly right though. The content is somewhat challenging for experienced players solo but novice players can still do everything by just forming a group. Novices get full rewards by completing everything in a group. If new players are determined not to improve their play and determined to fail by themselves then the challenge will be too high.

There is no “but I don’t want to ….”. Find friends to enjoy the instances with if you are finding them too hard. This is an MMO.

Andovar Edoras.2143:

And yet, here I am, fully enjoying the story and thinking its even better and funner than the whole Zhaitan thing (level 50+)…

Indeed.

I enjoyed the personal story (and played through various versions of it with various characters) up until Orr. Then it all became an annoying zombie blur.

I do however enjoy the living story greatly.

As far as difficulty goes: have you been to fort trinity? I don’t remember certain instances of the personal story being vastly easier than the new story instances…. anyway, I have a group of friends that (whenever possible) I do new content together with, and that mitigates that nicely.

Always be loyal to your krewe

Ah, that lovely lie that mmo means group or gtfo.

I’ve got nothing against grouping, but honestly, all ideals of forced grouping are the product of sacred cow thinking.

There is nothing about mmo that means anything less, different or other than that a lot of people can play at the same time. That’s it. Not one thing more or less.

That said, I’m pretty bored with Anet’s idea of making enemies more challenging by giving them insane hp and stupidly op attacks. The 80’s have been on the line for a while now. They want their Nintendo Hard back.

The mobs with challenging mechanics are fine, but yeah. If your idea of challenge is to just throw a multiplier on stats, you’re not really designing anything.

Frankly, I’ve been finding a lot of living story content pitifully boring due to that alone. Every stupid fight is just a waste of time. Unless you’re crippled in some literal fashion, rather few mobs are actually hard.

They’re TEDIOUS. They’d not more fun because I have to hit the thing 40 times while it does the same thing repeatedly, and I’m dead sick of veterans just being stat bloated blobs I have to waste more time pretending to care.

I’m loving the terrain navigation and exploration aspects. Mobs that are minibosses in virtually every respect?

Final fantasy 1 has a hall of giants in the earth cave. Don’t make everything a hall of giants. It’s really tedious.

I joined this “Planet Earth Living Story” game late in the 60’s and because I cannot participate in the American Revolution, I find it hard to figure out what is going on… My only source is YouTube and Wiki…

One Prarie Outpost.4860:

I joined this “Planet Earth Living Story” game late in the 60’s and because I cannot participate in the American Revolution, I find it hard to figure out what is going on… My only source is YouTube and Wiki…

Mind = Blown!

I feel ya man, although I think the LS is better than the personal story (personal story felt too childish) I’ve played since launch but didn’t do season 1 either and now it’s hard to relate to what it’s going on on season 2.

One Prarie Outpost.4860:

I joined this “Planet Earth Living Story” game late in the 60’s and because I cannot participate in the American Revolution, I find it hard to figure out what is going on… My only source is YouTube and Wiki…

Except people don’t act like you were there in the American Revolution and you are best friends now.