Guild Wars 2

The characters, even though they aren’t easy on the eyes from the start, are really fleshed out and I already feel a better connection with them then previous NPC’s ever will.

That’s because they are more subtle, greatly voiced and well written.
What also helps a ton in the likeable factor, is that they actually have a decent skillset.
They don’t die horribly like every other NPC in the personal story, which really helps drive the story instead of always having to pick up so called heroes from the dirt.

Both Braham’s and Rox’s story are genuinely interesting and they reminded me of Gw1 heroes, which is a good thing.

The fact that the story is mostly instanced now makes a better experience to.
Only thing I can complain about is difficulty. I wanted to jump in with my guildmates and our low lvl alts, but appearantly the story is 80 without you getting upscaled.

So we broke out the mains and 3 of us joined up to follow the story.
They are fun, nothing to complain about there, but it’s to easy.
I understand that you can’t ramp up the difficulty without hurting the more casual player who wants to see this story. It’s difficult to balance out, but the waves of normal mobs just melt like butter for us and we didn’t spot a single veteran amongst them.
The final bosses we’re both painfully easy.

Of course it’s just because we teamed up to do so, but still, the difficulty should be ramped up significantly if we do. I’m sure this was designed with solo play in mind, but I’m also sure many guilds would love to play this content as a team.

Maybe a hard mode could be introduced? The rewards could get upped tiny bit, veterans (for solo play) silver mobs (for group play) could be added into the story driven instances.
This would encourage people to experience the content together without shutting out the people who prefer to play solo.

Maybe I’m just being silly and missing the fairly challenging missions from Gw1 to much. But it couldn’t hurt to voice my opinion.

All in all, I’m really loving the patch and it’s definitely headed in the right direction.
My compliments to the developers.

I would also like to give some praise. I like how easy it is to access the new story content, and the heralds really allow us to find out new changes in-game, rather than having to look it up on the wiki. The icons on the map are also very helpful in locating these npc’s.

It was great to get some more fully voiced cut scenes, and I like entering these mini missions with a party. The boss at the end of each mini mission was also fun to fight. Not hard in the slightest, but with some cool special moves.

But on a more critical note, the two missions felt very much the same. It was basically just “kill all mobs + boss”. It would have been welcome to see both missions be radically different from one another.

The characters are much better written (so far) than most characters from the personal story (cough Trahearne and Destinies Edge). Lets hope they don’t mess it up by making them too righteous and goody-two-shoes. Some more humor would also be a welcome addition. Right now I’m not annoyed with the new characters, which is good. But I think we’ll need to see more of them to really start liking them. And that takes more than just teaming up with them. I hope we see some stuff from these characters that really defines them as characters.

• See them make mistakes
• See them be funny
• See them do something awesome
• Have them surprise us, by doing something we didn’t expect they would do

Also, that baby devourer is awesome. It reminds me of one of those pictures of really small spiders, with those huge black eyes. Looking forward to seeing more character development with Rox and her new pet.