I went through fractals and loved it, ran through WvW and spent around 2000 hours in this game across plenty of servers. The fact remains that on one side players are told that this game has no grind, when it does….
A player who only runs WvW and only that requires 750 BoH, 150 laurels and 100 ectos for ascended equipment.
This kind if play actually goes against the way guild wars 1 was played in the following way:
In guild wars 1 I made a scrapbook of over many Elementalist builds I got to work and were functional and did good in the different PvP and PvE offerings. Thanks to the way PvP worked I was able to test a lot of things.
GW2 is highly punishing to player characters in the sense one is encouraged to play one build and stick with it through obtaining ascended and exotics. If I want to change my build to a completely new one, I have to buy a complete set of new equipment. Full weapons, armors, trinkets and restat. I might as well roll a new character of the same type and go with it or deal with the inventory space required to have multiple sets of equipment.
Seriously, its not an exaggeration. I have many sets of armor and several sets of weapoms on Elementalist just to make different builds work. If you love a class, every good player has some sets….
In another mmorpg I play to keep myself from burning out in playing guild wars 2 I ran an instance with a full party and I got a high level rare weapon drop, then I raised it to +6. A friend told me it took him a few days of running instances when it took me two hours. I do not have to hunt for any weapon of the same class anymore because I have a top weapon.
My point is that GW2 has had more grind in obtaining equipment for multiple builds than almost any other game that I own that I play. I have to use my inventory space and storage space to carry around 18 pieces of armor and 10 – 15 weapons, and that is just being an Elementalist to run my build. That to me is just clutter…
While I like that WvW has been getting some attention, I do not like the fact that wether it takes five minutes or five hours to get that shiny laurel, that it still is grinding and counting down the days for equipment and I feel I have to put in time to play like others tell me to play, rather than actually play a game to explore and have fun.
I literally have to make it a ritual to launch the game, run my daily first and sometimes I remember I had to enter and run my daily and log out because I had little time to play and had to tell friends that after the daily I was logging. I did not wish to say that, but the laurels force me to chose wether I want to accumulate them or play with my friends at times and that to me is a failed system.
I play four games and when I only have ten to twenty minutes to play with a friend, I can not count on guild wars 2 since that means choosing the laurels first and my friends second. While twenty minutes is enough to finish most dailies, I like being able to log in, and just go without having to be burdened that no daily equals no laurel…which is why other games I just pick up my weapons and just go without worry.
This worries me a lot because if this means when ascended weapons and armor are released I’m going to have to grind for the sets for my Elly to use on her build and the WvW costs for trinkets are high, I can only imagine the kind of grind it would take to obtain full ascended gear per character….
…and I fear when that happens, gw2 will be about each player having one character, with one major build and full pricy equipment. All I can thank gw2 for is being easy to cap level, opposed to the other three games that I play, but the grind to obtain sets of equipment for all the builds I want to run in gw2 makes weapon and equipment gathering much tougher than the other three games that I play and even more of a grind.
