Guild Wars 2

It boggles my mind that people can play an RPG game thinking the stats do not matter. OF COURSE STATS MATTER! If stats didn’t matter, everyone would run around naked. Player skill matters more certainly, but that doesn’t mean stats are meaningless.

I see some people here boasting that they can solo dungeons naked or whatever. If that’s true then you’re not really the type person the OP is talking about.

People have to know their own skill level and play accordingly. If you know you can wreak havoc on the monsters in a dungeon regardless of what gear you are wearing, then fine wear your MF. But if you tend to get knocked out a lot, or even if you’re just not sure how much you are able to contribute to the group, then man-up (or woman-up) and wear gear with proper stats.

“Take heed! I have not taken leave of my senses! I’ve seen creatures of metal and steam!”

I typed this from memory. I should not have that memorized.

Other than her, the only other issue I have with the NPC audio is all of the giggling and laughing in Divinity’s Reach. What is so funny in that city?

It’s really not as simple as it sounds.

A spawn group might consist of 5 creatures. “OMG!” you say “Make that 1 creature! Fixed!” But you might not realize that there are also 5 allied NPCs, so now this one creature is going to get swarmed and killed in seconds.

If we ever had 5 allied NPCs that were actually useful in a fight, we wouldn’t have threads like this one. Allied NPCs hit with nerf bats. Here’s video proof And this is not an isolated case. With very few exceptions, friendly NPCs do not do any real damage. They are there only for show.

Maybe this is the root of the problem with story missions, since they almost always have these worthless friendly NPCs. If the developers have balanced the combat with friendly NPCs in mind, they might want to make sure they have weapons that do more than 1-2 damage per hit.

I understand it’s hard to have to make adjustments to 400 story missions, but in my experience it’s the majority of them that are out of whack. Just as vague answers like “all of them” are not helpful, asking players to make a report on each and every story mission they find out-of-balance is also unhelpful. That would mean we have to make something like 300-400 individual reports. I would have to make a forum post after almost every story mission I played, or create a spreadsheet to list the name and level of almost every story mission in the game. Frankly, I don’t have the time and I think it’s too much to ask paying customers to do this. Maybe if I was a beta tester I would take on this task, but this is not a beta.

Here’s another problem with asking us to report on specific missions: once I’ve played the mission and endured the hardship of it, I really don’t care anymore if you fix it or not. I’ve already played it and chances are I’m never going to play it again. Sure it would help the next guy to come along, but what good does that do me? Maybe that’s selfish, but hey I paid for this game. This isn’t beta, so we’re not in a “I just want to help make this game as great as possible” state of mind, we’re in the “I payed $60 for this game and I want my personal experience to be as great as possible.” That means I really don’t care about the story missions I’ve already played and can report about, I mostly want you to fix the story missions that I haven’t seen yet so they won’t suck by the time I get to them.

From the posts I’ve seen it seems to me that a pretty clear message has been given from the players to the developers: the vast majority of story missions are too hard and needlessly frustrating. There must be a more efficient solution than to wait until someone posts a message on the forum about every single story mission in the game before you act on it.

Here’s a suggestion: don’t down-rank player levels for story missions. That way if people love dying a thousand deaths in story missions, they can still play them when they are at or below the level of the mission for the full challenge. Those of us who just want to enjoy the story without headaches and huge repair bills can do our story missions when we’re one or two levels over. You can put a cap of maybe 3 levels over the mission so it doesn’t become a total cakewalk.

You might need to increase your camera speed. I have mine turned all the way up. I do wish it went a little higher, but I do OK with it at its current maximum.

I just came on here to post something similar to this thread after enduring a personal story cutscene with my character in his underwear because I died so many times that my stuff broke.

I can’t remember any story missions that have combat that I haven’t died at least once. And I’m talking about early missions, too. I can be doing level 18 & 19 renown hearts on a level 17 character with no problem, and then get face-melted when I try to do my level 14 story mission. Just now I was getting 1-shotted in the level 14 Asura mission “Beta Test” playing as level 17 Elementalist. The second enemy that comes out of the portal hit me once and I was immediately down.

I’m not against the game having difficult challenges, but the story missions are not the place for it. That’s just not what people do story missions for. It’s frustrating when you’re alone, nobody’s there to revive you, and your banging your head against these unnecessarily tough enemies when all you want is to see what happens next in the story. It’s hard to convince people to help with a story mission because there’s not much in it for them, and more importantly they don’t want to be spoiled if they are playing a different race or chose a different story path.

I’m a pretty experienced MMO player, and if I’m having trouble I imagine there must be more casual players who literally cannot advance in the story because of the difficulty. You can’t even out-level the content and come back when you’re stronger because the game just cuts your level on you, so it’s real harsh to make the story content so tough.

What gets me is how obvious many of the improvements are in GW2. Some of them make me literally slap my forehead and say “yes, of course!” Like putting bank access right into the crafting interface. How many times have I run back and forth between crafting areas and banks and mailboxes in other MMO games.

I guess some people like the pseudo-realism of having to physically go to the bank all the time, but really it’s silly. AN had the audacity to say “no forget that, we’ll just stick a bank tab right here.” Thanks, AN!

Other things like this:
Quest NPCs happen to be standing next to where you actually do the quest.
Fast travel that actually is fast instead of making you fly stupid zig-zags on the back of a bird.
Different skills based on weapon — amazing to think GW2 might be the first MMO to realize you don’t attack with a sharp dagger exactly the same way that you attack with a giant 50lb hammer.

No, GW2 is not a total revolution of the MMO, but I think it’s the first real evolution since WoW.

Keep vistas required! Just because something is not typical of MMOs doesn’t mean you remove it or make it optional. It’s those things that make GW2 unique and better than the rest. GW2 is faster-paced and more action-oriented than other MMOs, so I see no problem with having to complete exploration challenges that require some coordination to get credit for completing a map. If for whatever reason you need a game that does not require precise/coordinated movement, there are many for you to choose from.

I noticed this too. The butter to bread ratio is way off in the land of Tyria