Guild Wars 2

While only a minor issue, I have noticed that the current living story instances do not award XP, progress in most dailies, or any loot for killing enemies. Is this a bug or is it intentional?

The reason that I ask is because I was going through some personal story chapters with a low level character, and I was able to loot defeated enemies and make progress toward completing dailies, as well as earning XP.

I feel that stripping those features away from story instances makes the play experience less rewarding, and it punishes individuals who choose to sit down and play through the story as opposed to event hunting.

Is there a reason for the change in this design philosophy? What does everyone think?

I guess Arenanet will prevent that you farm the episodes like mad.

I think that’s why the end rewards for the LS steps are so large compared to the PS steps. In both instances you only get the reward once, but in the PS steps the end rewards are lessened because they expect you to be looting and gaining XP.

In addition, I’d imagine they don’t award XP both because the LS assumes you are level 80, but also because they’d prefer you to get involved in the open world for XP and karma, to ensure players have good mechanical reasons to interact with each other and populate maps and events.

All those blues and greys you’re getting from boxes at the end of each LS instance? Those are all the drops you didn’t get from mobs during the instance.

Hrmm. Well, those are good enough reasons, I suppose. Can’t say I agree with them completely though, especially the no XP aspect. We still need it to earn skill points for items/any skills we haven’t already unlocked. It also seems like daily kills aren’t awarded because of the whole no-XP thing as well, while other things, like reviving still awards XP and credit towards the daily. And honestly, farming the story doesn’t really seem any different than farming the same events over and over again. I will agree that it is good to keep players in the open world, but I think the design strategy could use a little tweaking.

The problem is that some of the story events were designed so that enemies just keep on respawning until the objective is complete. I feel this was a silly move; logically, how CAN the enemy have unlimited soldiers anyway?

It would have been better if the enemy waves stop after a certain amount of kills. This also increases variety when devising solutions to the challenge. Maybe your build is better suited to bunkering down with the NPCs on the walls or at the gate and keeping them alive with heals and boons. Or maybe your build means it’s better if you head out into the field and kill all enemies before they even have a chance to reach the walls. Players of both playstyles get to complete it the way they want, and both are happy.