Guild Wars 2

I’m loving the new story. I really am.

I just want to point out that the second Caudecus fight is complete and absolute garbage.

You can have either tight quarters OR aoe spam OR excessive add spawn. All three – especially with a teleport-happy boss that seems to instagib whether you use the counter or not (which? makes? no? sense???) – turns into a long, drawn out miserable experience that I’m still actually trying to finish as I type this. At this point, I’m just slogging through it because I’ll be kitten ed before I have to trudge through this no-checkpoint story instance again.

It plays like garbage. I can’t run around to avoid anything because the entire floor is orange. I can’t get a bead on the boss to do anything meaningful because the adds are always in the way. I can’t kill the boss because my armor is damaged from getting instagibbed, tanged, or knocked into something that kills me by the Jade Armor (also a terrible idea, having to dodge that thing’s knockback and freeze on top of everything else). There is no feeling of ‘yeah, I got this’, just a feeling of ‘I don’t want to stop because then I have to start all over again.’

My suggestion? Stop having the AOE spam when he’s dazed from the breakbar. Give me slightly more room to navigate, because at this point, I’m just doing 1% of damage every time I get his breakbar down, so that’s cool. And do something about the spinning room because, uh… you actually gave a friend of mine a seizure with that. That’s neat.

There’s just very little justification for buying the “pre-purchase.”

I don’t know what I’m getting. You’ve released specializations for a few classes, not the vast majority. We’ve seen part of one map. We’ve seen bits and pieces of the revenant, and we’ve caught glimpses of the mastery system. The only real confirmation we’ve got is that we get a guaranteed third season of the Living Story, which is not particularly gripping and has a lot of issues on the false difficulty front, especially considering that the rewards are… meh at best. At this point, the “expansion” looks more like anemic DLC than a true xpac, and it’s selfish to expect players to happily go on faith.

I can’t claim to know what the thought process looked like at Anet. But what I can tell you is what it looks like to a lot of people I play the game with: This looks like a badly thought out, horribly implemented capital grab that tried to piggyback on the flagging hype train. It’s a ‘strike while the iron is hot’ tactic that failed so miserably that the hammer slipped out of your hand and landed two counties over.

You’re asking us to pony up the effective cost of a new AAA game on a load of ‘maybes’ without the security of a preorder. We don’t even have a confirmed date. What we do have is Gail’s Reddit confirmation on Reddit that these are our only options and that nothing will change. It’s alienating, even to longtime fans, especially when we started realizing that new players get the best end of the deal and veterans – with countless hours invested into their accounts – don’t get so much as a character slot.

And it leaves a lot of us coming to the conclusion that it’s not worth it. Maybe we’ll buy it on release or a little after release when we actually know what we’re getting. The most insulting thing, though, is that so many people seem condescending or dismissive to the people who are raising concerns about this mess, even though if it was any other good or service, we’d be considered totally justified in raising holy hell to find out what we are in fact buying and not content to take it on “faith.”