Guild Wars 2

While it’s not the end of the world in itself, it is yet another thing to add to the long list of disappointing things about GW2 post HoT.

Outfits are a mixed bag, and you can argue all you want about them being more limited than actual armor sets, but there is one thing I’ll never agree again with in this game, and that is having actual NEW armor sets show up on the BLTC ever again.

Armor skins should be obtainable in-game and nowhere else, we have enough BLTC centric skins with BL weapons that is enough as it is.

Just a few quick things from playing a bit.

I guess it has been said over and over, but hammer 3 needs to be more reliable in the way it makes you jump around when you have a target selected (something like the Revenant sword skill) it would instantly make blasting fields better overall, and it would even make the Healing Gyro F skill something I could see myself use.

Gyros not being able to keep-up with the player was kind of expected, but that’s something that needs to be looked- at real fast.

Considering I have issues with staff animation pretty much since BWE1 and the Revenant, I can only agree with everything that was said.
And since I plan to play both of them as Charr ……

I’ll just add that when using Bounding Dodge with weapons other than staff, the way your character holds his weapons is just silly because he will pretend to use one.

We don’t necessarily need the Monkey-king animation, but yes something has to be done about some of those animations.
The re-used hammer animation stand-out like a sore-thumb, be it on the Revenant, or the Daredevil.

with the Daredevil, the issue is that when the character moves around with the weapon in hand it feels like it walks in slow-motion, and makes the weapon feel extremely heavy, then when skills are activated, it suddently feels like the staff doesn’t weigh anything anymore and that the character suddently activated super-speed.

Overall, you guys did a great job on all the Revenant animations, effects, etc …

But there is one thing that bothers me a bit, and it concerns some of the staff animations, mainly the ‘idle’ ones (when your character stands still with the staff in hand).

I don’t know if those are 100% finished yet but here are my two cents :p

Most of the melee staff animations of the Revenant have a martial-arts vibe to them and this stance that re-uses hammer animations just doesn’t look right with them as it gives the feeling that the staff is actually heavier than it looks.
You swing it around like it has the weight of a feather when you attack and then when you hold it it feels very heavy.

Same thing applies when the little animation where your character makes the weapon jump on one of his hands.

The first swing, of the #1 chain with the staff held in two hands (once again using hammer animation) looks ‘off’ on some races too and doesn’t look like it hits very hard, if at all.
(If I’m not mistaken it’s the same swing animation as Guardian hammer #4 and I always had the same feeling with it)

Some staves look really weird when held like this by some races, mainly Charr where some of them look really ‘short’ in their hands, the Pearl staff skin being the obvious one as it is the first one I saw during the beta.

In comparison the caster staff stances wouldn’t be perfect either because they maybe look a bit too casual on most races, but the fact that they are actually held like staves makes them a bit better in my opinion.
Special mention to the Charr one that almost looks like some kind a defensive kung-fou stance. (typo intended to avoid censoring >_< )

The transition between the caster stance and the staff being hold in the two hands already exists when you manipulate Ventari’s tablet and works reasonably well .
And well …. overall they look way cooler :p

In the grand scheme of things it’s not of the utmost importance and I might be the only one annoyed by that, but with Thief potentially getting staff with a similar animation style, I figured I’d share my thoughts about it.

• PC and NPC voiced dialogue
  It really brings the characters to life and is definitely more engaging than having to go through text menus.
  There is a few tweaks to do about this though, there seems to be some kind of head tracking technology working with it and it currently messes up your character when putting the camera in front of it and turning it sightly left and right, his head turns around immediately.
  Some tweaks may be necessary about the range in which characters react too, a few times in the itzel village my character started responding to an NPC who seemed to be one layer up, I couldn’t hear him, nor see him and it just felt weird.
  I’m still not 100% happy about the game pretty much deciding the attitude of my character, and putting words in his mouth that may or may not fit how I want him to be, but that’ an RP issue that goes way back to the personal story and that I feel is wayyyyy too late to ‘fix’

• ‘Stronger’ Mobs
  Some of the new mobs are definitely more interesting to fight, and I got more than one "oh kitten!’ moments when encountering them for the first time until I tried to understand what they actually were doing.
  Veteran versions are genuinely scary this time around.
  There is a downside to that though, in a group, when following an event, it creates two different situations :
  ’ Their abilities don’t matter ’ : they die so fast they don’t even get to use it.
  ’ (Rytlock) Can’t see S***t ! ’ : So many players around, so many skill effect (especially the new ones who are flashier than ever) and you just can’t se the mobs using their skills and you get downed without even seeing it coming.
  This could be a big issue in the context of ‘challenging group content’.

• The event chains.
  The two event chains available were really fun to play and diverse enough so that it didn’t feel like the same thing all along (when they worked)
  Some parts could use some tweaking like the Laranthir sniping event in the ruins (when planting explosives) or the ‘egg planting’ event before the wyvern, they felt a little bit too long.
  The wyvern fight at the end of the Itzel event chain felt really underwhelming though, it could definitely be a little bit more challenging, cause as it is now it is really anti-climactic.
  Night time definitely needs similar events to be as engaging.
  We’re obviously missing huge parts of the overall map design but it didn’t feel like it was even possible to fail one of those events and should we fail it seems it will just be another of those ‘wait until the map resets’.
  It particularly hit me when doing the Itzel ‘prophet’ quest where you throw food at him, you throw food again and again, but there is no visible ‘progress’ to it, we don’t necessarily need a progress bar, but something like him getting annoyed halfway through or groaning between two sentences as an indication that what you’re doing actually has some kind of impact could be something.
  A little side note about event chains, make sure the end rewards of the chain, and the things you can buy at the vendor with the currency you get will be enough incentive for the players to come back to this partcular event chain, and/or the map as a whole, or else the replayability part of the map may suffer from it quickly.
  Also I second this post!

• Reaper feels awesome to play
  Reaper shroud in particular, you guys really nailed the ‘feel’ of it.
  Number/Utility wise it’s another story and still needs tweaking, but that’s for another forum post entirely.
  As a side note don’t forget to look back at the base class and squeeze some of that new found utility in it too it definitely needs it.

• The overall look and feel of the map
  The map looks awesome, the music is awesome (to the point that when the old combat music kicks in it almost ruins it), ambient sounds are great, textures, lighting, it really feels like a whole other game.
  Special mention to the Itzel village which is my favorite place in the part of the map we had access to, especially at night, whoever was involved with this particular place, you get a hug from me
  Really looking forward to what you guys have in store for us for the rest of the expansion.
  One small little thing though, at night there is some kind of ‘bloom’ effect on your character that makes it a pain to grab good screenshots of your human character with pale-ish skin without having the skin areas ‘glow’ and loosing almost every detail in the face.
  There are also some pathfinding issues with the Itzel when they sit down at night, some of them end up half clipping in the fences and decorations on the various platforms.
  One othe thing is that while exploring, gliding / mushroom jumping was fun it didn’t seem to be any fun little things to discover scattered all around in odd places.

I played mostly in Verdant brink.

Reaper shroud feels awesome to play, it’s satisfying as much visually as for the ‘feedback’ of skills in almost every way, and I guess it’s one of the main thing that makes it appealing for most, for good reason.

That being said …

Greatsword overall feels underwhelming, it feels to me like wielding warrior/guardian hammer in terms of speed/weight but with far FAR less utility (stuns, CC’s etc …)
Overall damage feels a little low.

Death Spiral could use something so that you can better judge the distance, and the area in front of you where ennemies will be hit, I found myself being sometimes too far away, but not from much and others being really surprised to actually hit so many ennemies in a cone in front of me.

Grasping darkness seems quite unreliable against fast moving ennemies.

For reaper shroud, the only big issue I can see is life force generation, there is no way to really sustain it period, even less whe,n you consider that it puts you in melee range.
It affects the survivability aspect of it as well as it’s overall utility.

Reaper shroud granting access to some stability is nice (and potentially more utility against projectile from what was discussed), but needing to specialize reaper to have access to it with RS or ‘We are all weaklings’ is a bad idea.
The base class could use some love about those things too, restricting those kind of things to the reaper, as the class stands now and for the months/years to come seems like a very bad idea.

Chill overall seems like it doesnt do much, and is far from being the utility that was described to us even fully traited.

Shouts don’t seem very good I can’t say that I found them really useful at all, and their cast time really is an issue.

I specced blood magic for a bit and I was really surprised with how much I was able to heal with ‘Soul Spiral’ RS#4 which is quite nice and offers some good utility, it could be something really cool if that (and maybe overall leech) could be somewhat affected by some stats to have ways of improving it even further.

The spec and especially the new shroud ‘feels’ great to play that’s why many people are impressed by it, but as far as numbers and utility go i’m far from being convinced.

Greatsword needs some work.
Life fore generation in RS is a big concern.
Chill is mostly useless.
Shouts are a mixed bag.
Extra utility in RS is nice but I don’t like that they forget to give the base class some love too.

Not necessarily ‘back to the drawing board’ but it definitely needs some heavy tweaking.

Greatsword itsel feels like wielding a hammer on classes like Warrior or Guardian but with completely sub-par utility attached to it.

Chill as a whole even fully traited is barely noticeable, only the ‘Chilled to the bone’ shout does something significant, but the Cooldown is way too high.

It doesn’t need more damage reduction, it need infinitely better life force-generation in Reaper Shroud which will solve the issue.

Playing the reaper with acess to some stability and seeing the tournament when Nos ended in situations similar to mine in PvP where you turn on DS and suddently just attract every CC of your opponents until you’re dead (rather quickly in fact) just made me realize that what they are doing with the Necro wile giving all the shiny new toys exclusively to Reaper Shroud is actually a terrible idea.

The ‘base class’ desperately needs acces to some of those as well.

Ds might be a ‘second life bar’ but it’s useless when you cant do anything with it because you’re too busy being a ping-pong ball.

I pretty much agree, the UI on the map is confusing you don’t know what you’ll get and how you’ll get it.

You don’t get rewards from every single event, so be it, but as it stands now rewards, when you earn them go straight into your inventory.
The thing is at the end of an event you often end up looting things and the rewards is lost in all the other things you just grabbed, so it makes it hard to keep track of what you earned through the system.
Maybe they want to avoid the hassle of opening UI chests which I can understand, but we really need to have those rewards highlighted in a way or another.

As far as Jumping puzzles and mini dungeons go, they clearly should reward the player every time, if not give multiple items from the selection of items.

The selection of items in low level maps must also have things to appeal to max level players, as it is now, some maps have low level mats and useless (low demand) high level ones.
If that occurs too often those maps will be ignored and the purpose of the system will be halved.
(I’m saying that not knowing which low level and low demand items will be used in HoT recipes and legendary crafting, so take that into account)

As it stands for providing a semi-reliable way to farm items through event rewards it seems that it stands far far away from other possibilities to get those items or to get the gold to buy those items.

As for a few good things, having things like dyes, or junk items worth 30s on some maps was a nice touch, i’m expecting more of this kind of things.

PART 2 (kitten you character limit ! :p )

As a reminder the regions of the game are these ones and all have each 6 zones (not counting dungeons, towns and such) :
- Ascalon
- Kryta
- Maguuma Jungle
- Shiverpeak Mountains

I’ll leave Orr and Maaguma Wastes out of this example because they are supposed to be their own separate thing.

Could be an opportunity to introduce some more ‘racial’ themed skins to the game, provide an easier way to introduce non Gem / BL ticket bound skins to the game from time to time (for a change) as well as providing a convenient way of eventually introducing new rare crafting materials for things to come and all kind of items alike.

In the end you would basically have in each zone, some short/medium term goals added in terms of specific items to get, and a more long-term selection of rewards with more regular crafting oriented materials to grab and whatever direct or indirect monetary reward you would tie to completing the events at level 80.
It would of course need some basic updating from time to time to stay as ‘fresh’ and as interesting as possible.

‘Dynamic’ events  :

Now I won’t be as extensive about that, but I have to talk about it as it also will complement my idea above.

What I gathered is that there was always this idea that maps and their dynamic events were always meant to be some sort of ‘engame’ and Orr especially so.

But beyond the ‘carrot’ that would represent some kind of reward ‘dynamic events’ don’t feel as dynamic as they maybe should have been, patterns are pretty clear, failing an event has more than often very little consequences, even if it is one tied to the opening of a dungeon.

That boils pretty much to the fact that re-starting the event is just a matter of waiting that the first event of the chain pops back up again, and since megaservers, the fact that maps are always populated make it almost impossible for an event to fail anyway, moreso when the bigger events are tied to a world boss, and on a timer.

It feels like there is no stake in any of the maps, no scenario where a player would go ‘kitten we might fail this’ as if it were somewhat a big deal, and this is really something that could make the whole thing more interesting.
But it would require ideas and balance that would not discourage all players and once again finding the right balance for that doesn’t seem like the simplest task.

Dry top is a step in the right direction in almost every regard, from rewards to having some kind of pressure to go and complete the events and complete them as fast as possible.
I wouldn’t say it’s perfect, it’s still very predictable and maybe not ‘sandbox-y’ enough, but it does some things better than the others.
But every map wouldn’t work like Dry Top and we would definitely need a variety of maps with mechanics in the vein of that.

To end this a word about hearts, since it is what started this topic, I personally don’t see the point for them to be repeatable, their only purpose is to provide some basic guidance when evolving through the zones and especially low level ones, and should you want to play them again, an alt does the trick just fine.
Now if making an option to reset a heart isn’t too much work why not have it as an option for those who really want it, but resetting them on a regular basis doesn’t sound good to me.

Let’s take a look at the zones :

They are a fine way of leveling, hearts doprovide a certain amount of guidance, dynamic events are a good source of XP and Karma and break the monotony (for a time)

Once you hit 80, why would you come back to a lower level area in the current state of things  ?

• World completion
• World Bosses
• help a friend that is leveling
• find a jumping puzzle you haven’t completed yet
• grab a Karma item exclusive to this zone
• farm lower level materials you might need.
• Roleplaying
• A LS episode

First thing that comes to mind when looking at this is that most of them are very ponctual activities, go in, do your thing, complete it, go out, there is no long term goal to achieve, nor reasons to stay for more than that.

Why no event farming in all this  ? Because doing it in level 80 zones is more rewarding in terms of pretty much everything you can earn on the way.

And that is the big part of the problem.

In order to make the lower level areas more attractive for a level 80 character there must be a way to be able to get as much silver/gold/ high level crafting mats than when playing in a level 80 area.
And by stating that, the first tricky detail emerges, because on top of that you need access to the lower level ones as well since they are used in lvl 80 crafting too.

Rewards  :

If you want people to come back to lower level areas, there has to be some sort of incentive, something that, when they resume their play session, or go elsewhere, makes them feel like they didn’t just waste their time, or ‘grind’ for pretty much nothing.

Hawkian’s suggestion about event chains regarding rewards that he mentioned earlier is a very good one and would be a good start  (and the ideas I’ll throw a bit later in this post are loosely based on this) :
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Rewarding-Adventure-in-the-Open-World

The only thing I personally don’t like about it is that it involves directly a monetary reward in terms of gold, and I don’t completely agree with that, in the sense that, considering how the economy of the game works I’d rather have access to additional crafting materials first, that I can eventually trade for gold later if I don’t have a use for them.

Why that  ?
Simply because in most cases there is already in the game too much situations where farming for gold and buying things directly for gold gets you things easier/faster that playing the game and collecting them, and considering that many things in the game, and in the LS rely one way or another on crafting, i’d rather get things that make me more self suficcient, and less reliant on the variations of the TP prices than straight-up gold.
There is Imo in the game already too much of that.

The problem of ‘the most efficient path on the most efficient map’ is very real and while there is no real way to prevent this than 100% perfect balance (which is pretty much impossible) one way to tone this down I think, is to have additional points of interest in terms of rewards to give an incentive to go elsewhere.

So let’s say we have a system akin to this in place, where completing an event chain, or participating in X events consecutively rewards you [something], and / or a token.
(be it a guaranteed drop, or something a ‘little’ bit more rare)

Each zone would have a vendor, similar to the Karma one, with a range of themed items, skins, tonics or whatever exclusive to this zone, but only available for level 80 characters because getting the tokens would be an endgame thing.
Imagine this vendor with a range of things like what was available at this year’s festival of the four winds for instance (from armor / weapon skins to simple material bags or crafting materials), but themed around the area they are in.

Now I already see a complaint coming ‘but then I only can / have to farm in this zone’ you’re locking content yadda yadda …

The thing is the vendor in each zone would have a small selection of exclusive goods, but the tokens required would be ‘region’ wide, meaning that if I want something exclusive from, say the Metrica province, I can get tokens in all zones of the Maguuma Jungle.
Doing so, you don’t have to repeat the events of a single zone, and you can skip the ones you don’t like and are still left with a choice of several zones to play in.
Also, should the exclusive items of a particular vendor not interst you, you still would have some incentive to play in the zone because you can spend your tokens elsewhere as well or fall back on the crafting ingredients.

It is also something very close to what the Orr temple vendors already do.

Carighan.6758:

Kentsui.4930:

Also the achievements that unlock don’t seem to give access to some kind of ‘unique’ reward

This was specifically asked for by players. All over the forums, repeatedly, throughout season 1. To not bind stuff to the meta-achievement or the achievements in general, so as to remove the “forced grind” of it.

And they listened. :P

The one big difference with season 1 is that the content doesn’t go away, so everyone will have a shot to grab it.

A single achievement in the form of a challenge ( when I think of challenge, think something like Liadri ) would do the trick just fine.
It may involve some kind of ‘grind’ if you fail repeatedly, but it’s way more satisfying when you complete it.

Also achievement hunting for the sake of it isn’t really exciting for everyone, and having challenging things to complete without having something to show for it(but a pile of greens ..) only goes so far.

I’ll have to disagree.

The holo-journal logs, and Taimi aknowledging your personal story were the highlights certainly, but that’s a bout it.

The rest is still plagued by the same issues that personal story is : pacing problems, frustrating/unbalanced fights rather than fun ones, NPC’s slowing you down and being more an annoyance than a help.

Also the achievements that unlock don’t seem to give access to some kind of ‘unique’ reward, all chests indicate the things you get from the events on the map + ‘other loot’ that doesn’t bode well.

If I were to put myself in the shoes of someone that would have to pay 250 gems for those 3-4 missions, my conclusion would be : not worth it.

I also hope we will unlock more of the map before we get new story missions, because if you’re not big on achievement hunting, there is actually very few thing to do in Dry Top.

Danikat.8537:

Personally I see it as a good opportunity for players to learn that you can’t just zerg everything and to practice alternative tactics and coordination. If enough people can get the hang of it there will be more chance of Anet adding more similar content in future.

When you want to teach someone how to swim, you don’t throw them in the water and tell them “Swim ! Now !”
That is basically what they did with this event.

A few pointers on how the event was supposed to be done, and some ways to monitor what happens in other areas on the UI among other things, would have gone a long way to prevent the mess created around this event.

The problem with this event is not the event itself, and players are only a fraction of the problem.

What we are missing for this kind of content that requires more coordination are the proper tools to be able to monitor and complete it.
Commander tags just don’t do it properly for this one and can too easily be used to troll.

A simple improvement that could do wonders would be to display ALL the bosses life bars at the same time regardless of the zone you’re in.
So if you see a life bar that does not go down, go there !

A second one would be to have the number of players in each area displayed as well, but I doubt that is even possible.

That would be a giant step in the right direction for every player.