Guild Wars 2

They told us what to expect with the name of this expansion, Heart of Thorns. The new Borderlands maps are a twisted, painful and unpleasant experience, like walking through a one I am extremely saddened but not surprised to see ANet burden it’s customers with.

I pre-ordered GW2, took part in the betas and played the game solidly for a year after release. After that however, the many unaddressed issues and questionable design decisions led me to spent my time and money elsewhere. I picked up GW2 again recently and pre-ordered HoT, with hope that they would have learned a few things in the interim, but as much as I appreciate their effort and skill in some areas, the lack in others makes me regret spending the money on the expansion and feel remorse at how little time I will likely spend now in my favorite part of the game, WvW.

I won’t belabor the point too much as it’s pretty clear from the posts I’ve been seeing that many people share my opinion – but the new BL maps have far too much in the way of PvE elements, the map design has destroyed all natural flow, the number of gimmicks and secondary mechanics has exploded, with the overall result being an inelegant, ugly mess. It wasn’t enough putting WvW and PvE elements into sPvP, now we’ve got more PvE, fractal and jumping puzzle gameplay in WvW. To call it awful would be too kind.

I’ll summarize my take on why ANet misses the mark all too often with these two basic examples. The give us the ability to upgrade a supply camp with guard escorts, which are largely useless. To make things worse, on the West side of the old BL maps, the place mobs in a location where every single time the yak and it’s guards walk by, the guards are pulled away from the yak to the mobs. Relocating the mob or mobs a short distance would have addressed this, but to my horror if not surprise, coming back to the game over a year later, this oversight was not correct.

In the new BL maps, the number of guards at the supply camps has been increased. At the East camp, I killed the supervisor and a set of guards, and was able to stand in the capture circle with FIVE unkilled guards, standing inches outside and around the circle, doing absolutely nothing while I stood inside it capturing the camp.

These clearly undesirable, and dare I say stupid occurrences, are to me at least, evidence of a lack of either attention to detail, proper play-testing or both. You cannot have escorted a single yak in the former case and remarked on the guards getting dragged off every time, or have captured the camp in the latter case and been dumbfounded at the large number of guards just standing there.

If these are too subtle for you, being able to port into your native tower, using the WP, even when it is under hostile control, is a more blatant example It’s just…sloppy. Not right. Wrong.

I don’t know what they were thinking with many of these oversights, design decisions and game-play changes. ANet does some things in this MMO context better than anyone else…but many many others, are horrible, and seemingly stubbornly so, for no good reason I can fathom.

I was extremely excited for enhancements to WvW…this is not what I was hoping for.

you can now salvage your wvw gear! SALVAGE. WVW GEAR! what are you complaining about? they only needed two years to implement that change! maybe two years from now WvW will be fun again!

STAY TUNED!!!

kitten ups…