Guild Wars 2

Positives

• Dry Top map – I’ve really enjoyed this map, and I think it’s well designed. Though I know some people dislike the Zephyrite crystals, the vertical dimension adds a lot of uniqueness and depth to the zone. The sandstorms every hour provide incentive for people on the map to work together, while the general difficulty of the area is not quite as hard as Southsun to solo, so I think we will retain the critical mass required to do the events. I also like that there is a unique weapon skin set associated with Dry Top. Hopefully every new zone will have this feature.
  Edit: the vine bridge was a nice nod to GW1!

• The Ambrite weapon skins deserve their own hurrah! It’s nice to see a new and good looking weapon set available in-game and not through the Trading Post. My only suggestion is maybe make the fossilized insects available to buy for ~500 geodes so that it isn’t completely dependent on random number generation.

• Rewards and achievements available after the mission is played through the first time is a good idea, especially if they’re difficult. It encourages people to group for the missions, like in GW1. It would be nice if the rewards were a little more unique, but I think this has great potential to be turned into a “hard mode”.

Negatives

• No Experience Lootless Mobs – I disliked them in the personal story (e.g., Battle of Fort Trinity) and I dislike them now. I understand there is a need to prevent the repeated farming of large groups of enemies, but having them give no loot, no experience, and not trigger on-death mechanics just makes them feel… artificial. Like they’re not real enemies, they’re just extras thrown in to create a sense of drama. I suggest letting them give XP and loot during a normal length single play through, but have rapid diminishing returns to prevent abuse like repeated play throughs everyday.

• Taking away character skills – This only happened during Discovering Scarlet’s Breakthough, but I want to caution against taking away a player’s chosen set of skills and replacing them with a canned set that’s foreign to the player and may not be enjoyable (no matter how powerful they are). For a game that is often criticized for only having to spam the #1 skill, I was not pleased to be transformed into a steam creature where I only had 2 skills! I disliked using the desert wurms in Nightfall, I have a character stuck on the personal story mission Air Drop because I detest it so much, and feel the same way about the cannon and steam creature in Discovering Scarlet’s Breakthough. Please let us play how we want, which is how we have set up our characters. The unique mechanics can be included in the enemy instead.

• Waiting for events to occur in Dragon’s Reach Part 1 – This was the low point of Season 2 for me. The Iron Marches and Frostgorge events should have been instanced. Nothing is gained by turning these parts into open world zerg events, either you don’t have enough people to complete them, or there are so many people that your contribution counts for nothing (or they don’t start properly because events often get stuck).

Tranc.6780:

• Waiting for events to occur in Dragon’s Reach Part 1 – This was the low point of Season 2 for me. The Iron Marches and Frostgorge events should have been instanced. Nothing is gained by turning these parts into open world zerg events, either you don’t have enough people to complete them, or there are so many people that your contribution counts for nothing (or they don’t start properly because events often get stuck).

That should be a positive, not a negative.

It made the world feel more involved and made room to play with other people.

I’ve no idea if the changes to Iron Marches will be affected, but the Devs did expressly state that not all Open World content would be permanent. Some of it would come and go only to support the active story.

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

I’ve no idea if the changes to Iron Marches will be affected, but the Devs did expressly state that not all Open World content would be permanent. Some of it would come and go only to support the active story.

True, so presumably they would have to provide an instanced version of the map for players who replay the episode at a later date if the vines ever disappear from Iron Marches. Which actually would work quite well as it would be like the story dungeons that take place at a specific time.

I quite liked the open world events in this release, despite the zerg and that making it harder to play (my computer being poor), as i did feel like it gave the events a sense of urgency.

I was most annoyed with how they dropped the name ‘mordremoth’.In the personal story it states there are 5 dragons (that’s not including Mordremoth). So somewhere between the end of the personal story and the start of season 2 we learn the existence of the 6th dragon and everything about him. You would think it would be bigger news then:
“Person a: it’s mordremoth.
Person b: yeah, has to be. We now him now for 5 full seconds, so it has be him”.

And most of the story doesn’t even make any sense. In the personal story we meet the orders. They basically exist to fight the dragons. To improve efficiency all 3 of them started working together in a pact. So… why are we even in need of this summit? Way better (and more logic) would be to contact the pact and work from there… Or how about the part where rytlock doesn’t know the veins are in the ‘iron marches’ and our character not saying anything despite ‘investigating’ there not even 5 minutes ago…

Another problem is (and someone already said this somewhere) that they seem to go through plot points way to quickly. In 3 episodes we have seen:
- Saved the ‘master of Peace’
- figured out mordremoth exists
- discovered ley-lines
- omad’s machine (and tried it out)
- tell the pale tree about omad’s machine (just so she could be angry about it, because “it’s very dangerous” although she doesn’t protect humans with her dreams, so it’s not really “dangerous” for me…)
- Saved the waypoints (well… it’s in progress)
- Dealing a big blow to the jotun (to get eir to get someone else to the summit)
- Rytlock (failing) to get rid of the ghosts

How about slowing down on the plot points? All these points are big (and important) enough to give them all their own episode. I’m guessing that the story would be better told if they slowed down and all these points (and also remembered what happened in both the personal story and 5 minutes before in the living world :p )

btw, is it me or is it a bit ironic that the important stuff still isn’t in the game? Season one ‘forgot’ to tell/show how scarlet got insane (you had to read it on the forum), didn’t mention why 2 different enemies started working together (had to read in on the forums). In season 2, they ‘forgot’ to show us how we got to know mordremoth…

runeblade.7514:

Tranc.6780:

• Waiting for events to occur in Dragon’s Reach Part 1 – This was the low point of Season 2 for me. The Iron Marches and Frostgorge events should have been instanced. Nothing is gained by turning these parts into open world zerg events, either you don’t have enough people to complete them, or there are so many people that your contribution counts for nothing (or they don’t start properly because events often get stuck).

That should be a positive, not a negative.

It made the world feel more involved and made room to play with other people.

Disagree, sort of. I did my story line and didn’t see any event when destroying that jotun statue thing. So I was basically like “So these 2 jotun and touching that statue was so hard for the norn people? Either dragons aren’t what they used to be or the norn aren’t worth the trouble…”