Guild Wars 2

Well the reddit has more quality posts than the QQfest that happens here. There is a more balance between positive and negative. Just by reading the official forums, you’d think no one likes this game.

TheDraco.3965:

Im a bit confused here. This thread was posted a month ago stated that 2 guilds will be raid testing. So if its out in the open then why does the guild need to state what has already been stated?

Those tweets do not show that they were testers, just that they completed it in 15 minutes. That looks downright awful to people out of the loop and makes the new endgame PvE (something a lot of people originally slated this game for not having) look easy and worthless.

TJgalon.5012:

Lunacy Solacio.6514:

TJgalon.5012:

so, if I understand this right, the people are upset because they are not handed everything right out the gate?

Some might be, but that should have been unrealistic. No, there are many posts that explain the problem with this but if you want to dismiss people and their issues so easily, I suppose nothing that hasn’t already been said will explain it. Therefore I won’t bother to repeat it.

I basically what I am reading. People are upset they have to earn the stuff they want. It seem like common sense to me, that you have to earn it.

Exactly, and the best irony of all was how these same people were complaining about the small number of new maps. Now they are complaining about having to play through those maps.

The amount of people not reading the entire dev post is amazing.

Lunacy Solacio.6514:

TJgalon.5012:

so, if I understand this right, the people are upset because they are not handed everything right out the gate?

Some might be, but that should have been unrealistic. No, there are many posts that explain the problem with this but if you want to dismiss people and their issues so easily, I suppose nothing that hasn’t already been said will explain it. Therefore I won’t bother to repeat it.

I basically what I am reading. People are upset they have to earn the stuff they want. It seem like common sense to me, that you have to earn it.

I think what GW2 did is totally fair. Practically having a new class available right away would cheapen it. As you play the game you’ll unlock your new spec naturally.

But for alts, it will be a big task. Unless getting those new items in WvW is pretty fast.

so, if I understand this right, the people are upset because they are not handed everything right out the gate?

Im glad they didnt just give it all to us right away. And, it is definitely still much better than “gain 10 levels.”

Like how they are doing progression for HOT.

Henahax.1706:

Does spending the very first point on the line give me the ability to wield the new weapon?

well, come on, you want everything handed on a silver plate? At least a bit of work to get there… :/

I’m a little disturbed by the level of antagonism here over the gold reward going down for dungeons. I think the concern is less over the content changes, and more over your 40g a day cash flow.

Running a series of the easiest and fastest dungeon paths, skipping as much content as possible, is generally not done to be ‘fun’. It is done strictly for gold, and it’s easy money.

The gold rewards are going down to disincentivize running easy paths for gold. People will continue to play dungeons for tokens, and if the drops are improved – people might even kill things in dungeons instead of skipping to the boss.

Didn’t log into the forums for a day, and I walk into this…

Anyways, let’s go over some of the discussion that’s been going on in this thread. I’ll take the arguments apart one by one to make it easier to digest:

Raids should have different levels of difficulty like FotM

No. Raids are hardcore end-game challenges. What’s the point in saying “I beat the first Raid Wing” when someone can say the same thing with an easy button engaged? There should not be the opportunity for everyone to beat a Raid. Either your team is good enough to beat it, or they’re not. Simple as that.

Raids with lower difficulty levels won’t reward as good

It’s not just about the loot. It’s about the accomplishment of actually beating the content. If Anet were to implement easy Raids and hard Raids, you basically kill the content.

I can’t do Raids. I’ll quit the game.

Raids are just one single challenge in an entire game full of Casual friendly content. Just because you can’t complete this 1% of the game, doesn’t mean the other 99% ceases to exist. No one will quit the game just because of Raids.

Designing Raids means Devs have no time for other content

There are multiple teams working on multiple projects at any given time. Once HoT goes live, the team goes right back to designing Cantha making other content. I wouldn’t be surprised if Colin already has people working on the next expansion.

Raids are an MMO trap the Colin promised there wouldn’t be any

No, Raids are just one more type of game play. Don’t like Raids? There are still Dungeons and FotM for you and your party to run.

I’m a Casual gamer, so I can’t play Raids

Not true. Raids are open for anyone to try. It’s not locked away from you. The part that will prove to be difficult is beating the end boss. But failures should encourage you to become a better player, and a better team.

Raids require me to have good gear

Yes. Yes it does. And that’s not a problem at all, since this is end-game Elite level content. If you’re not geared to walk into the hardest content available, then you’re not prepared to win. There’s a Gear Gate, Skill Gate, and a Mastery Gate. Later wings require all three, and then some. Think of it like that sign at the Disneyland rides: You have to be “this” tall to enter.

As long as they reintroduce a way of acquiring it I have no objections to this.
Emphasis on the word reintroduce

Mitch.4781:

Interesting how you lock threads that criticise the raid yet keep open threads praising it.

That won’t make the raid any better anet.

There’s plenty of threads open with constructive criticism. Threads that start to treat the devs as subhuman deserve to be locked.

At the end of the day, you still need to remember that there are actual human beings putting in long hours to create and update this game. That doesn’t mean you have to worship them or praise everything they do, but it does mean you should be at least somewhat tactful with expressing your criticisms.

I knew people would hate it but I LOVE that you have to go a bit without gliding. Take a look around and appreciate the game around you. You would skip it all just going to objectives without them and thats fine but first time through it shouldnt kill you to hoof it. You appreciate the masteries more once you get them as well.

As for expanding progression for end game they are great. You see them as “Grindy” because you want the benefits right now. However you will get them simply by working towards other objectives in EVERYTHING you do. So just set other goals and you will notice progression over time.

Do people even know what “grinding” means? Gosh people got so kittening spoiled with this game…

If they provide you with MULTIPLE ways to gain MEANINGFUL progress, IT IS NOT GRINDING.

The kitten do you want, for them to change how the game works every week? OF COURSE there will be repetition, repetition is INEVITABLE

Seriously, from the old WoW days killing mobs in a certain area over and over and over again for mats, was considered grinding, today? Apparently everything you do is grinding. Jesus

Agreed. For me, BWE2 was about the perfect balance. It was engaging to play, and it was satisfying to win. It’s really difficult to get engaged if I don’t care about being hit, or if the mob is dead before I get to see their mechanics.

I hope the reduction in difficulty wasn’t because of player feedback…

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

it’s probably intentional so that players get faster to the new bosses. At least I hope so.

That’s what I hope too but it also works the other way: What if they intentionally cranked up the difficulty in BW2 so people would spend more time fighting the mobs and the difficulty we have in BW3 is how it’s always supposed to be?

WARNING: Huge wall of text.
So i know there are already many forums showing sadness towards the nerf for open-world content and HoT story instances. However I either missed or didn’t see any posts specifying some reasons why, so I’m doing this.

First of all, there are some arguments against this:
1. Who cares? Its open-world anyways. : Open-world affects most other aspects of Gw2, which I will go in below. Also, I’m not saying open-world should be extremely difficult like raids, however it shouldn’t be so easy you can not pay attention and stroll through the maps and story.

2. Calm down! This is a beta and they probably know this. No need to bother like this : Whether this is true or not doesn’t matter because there are only 20 days until HoT releases. And this is the LAST beta weekend.

3. Maybe the open-world wasn’t nerfed, rather we got used to the content/got better and we got better tools (elite specs etc) : If this is the case, then Anet needs to consider buffing open-world content as the problem isn’t solved anyways.

Ok now to the reasons. Please add more reasons or feel free to disagree with mine in the comments.

1. A-net’s fear of player frustration as Gw2 is directed (as of now) to a more casual audience is irrelevant : The reason I say this is because the events that are happening right can easily be compared to the Gw2 base game beta. For those who don’t know the content was a lot harder then as well, and Anet nerfed it. Personally I’m not too peeved with that nerf because it was the release of the game. People were bad and didn’t know the mechanics and lower level. However HoT is an EXPANSION, all of the content is level-80 based. By this point people should be SOMEWHAT good at the game. Personally right now running in Queensdale at lv 10 is no different than running in Verdant Brink at lv 80, which is very bad for an MMO.

2. Open-world actually affects other content : What this means is that an easier open-world actually affects the skill level and acceptance of the player-base and even go as far as affecting WvW, raids and masteries. A key reason for this is because open-world shares mechanics and gear with those other parts of Gw2. If players don’t know what they are doing, that just shows the open-world content doesn’t have enough difficulty and mechanics to teach them.

3. Immersion : Gw2 has great lore and great story to it which is mostly explored through personal/HoT story and the open-world (which were both nerfed as far as I’m aware) and perhaps this is one of the reasons they were nerfed, so that everyone could experience the story. Once again, however, since HoT has no level or gear raise everyone playing it, even if the game is casual-based, should have some idea of what they are doing. Would you rather half-pay attention to the open-world or story instances will killing bosses by spamming buttons or actually pay attention to what you are doing, and when you beat a mordrem boss feel like you accomplished something and that mordrem actually had some sort of THREAT, unlike most the current open-world bosses. The second option is much better for immersion and story.

It has gotten to the point where it made me think the druid auto attack was actually OP until i read the posts. I was doing way too much damage on celestial than i should. I really hope the maguuma goes back to being a hostile land rather than a mild inconvenience.

I have to agree with this post. I was surprised yesterday, and just thought that maybe it was due to the changes made to Tempest (which is the class I played/play the most throught the different BWEs)… but apparently everyone gets the same experience.

As you say, even if the mobs were left untouched, they need to scale to the buffs that we, as players, get. It does feel more like gardening than struggling to survive in the Jungle. Of course it was challenging and sometimes discouraging but the immersion was so perfect. BWE2 was really in a great place with the open world (except for a few bugs with the quests, but they’re fixed now).
I basically afk’d in the middle of a contested camp at night and just lazyly pressed a few keys whenever a mob got to me. And it died. I shouldn’t have been able to do that. Or I suddenly became godlike at this game, but I sincerely doubt that :p

It needed some tweaking, but sometimes I’m lucky to find a mob now let alone find anything dangerous to attack me.

If it’s a comparison between the 2 difficulties, I’d lean closer to how it was in BWE2. It was hard, but fun

I been in on all 3 beta tests. And doing the first one was actually too hard because some of the mobs was overlapping eachother and you could easy end up with three or four of those that will kill you if you were not careful.
There was no way of reaching a spot were you could stand still for a few sec to get your cd backs to proceed. There was just hordes after hordes of mobs and moving from one point to anohter having to deal with 10 veterans, 5 elites and 50 normal mobs were at least 10 had oneshot skills every 5 meters was a bit exhausting.

Second beta it was toned down and it still felt challanging to deal with, but i was saticefied and it felt ok that it was hard. A bit lesser mobs, less hard to deal with and points were i could get out of combat.

This beta feels like they nerfed everything down to the ground. There is nothing in there that is hard to deal with, and if there is anything i can just dodge away and leave. At this point cursed shore feels harder to wal through, but only because the mobs there are anoying and slow you down. I did not even see those horrible bow mobs that one shot you, and those that runs you over and shadowstep to you, well he did two times and then i was to far away from it to care. The events was super easy as well, the feeling i had the last beta were it was a struggle and a challange to make those events, and the champs was so hard to beat but fun. This weekend the champs was a big meh and they went down super easy and the only people that went down was those that always stand in kitten over and over and then die and wait for a ress, but they will always be there, why make content around them?

Why is there never any inbetween for you guys when it comes to nerfs? Why take such huge swings so that the content suddenly feels to easy?
I read all the forum posts from past betas and they were all pretty clear and said the same thing, please don’t make it to easy. Tone a few of the mobs down a bit so they don’t one shot some of the classes, and give us some spots to get out of combat and get cd’s back. And maybe place the hardest mobs on event spots instead of spots were you just move from point a to b.

And you did tone it down but here is my problem. First beta my healthbar was mostly on low and it was a constant struggle. This beta it have not moved under 80% except for when falling down.

So could the guys with the big nerfhammers please replace them with something less? Maybe toath picks?

100% agree. Content in HoT Maps needs to be challenging.

This needs more attention! If you want us to be roaming around the jungle, please make it difficult enough to hold our attention. I don’t want HoT to just be mastery completion and chill – let it feel a bit easier once we’ve spent a good chunk of time “mastering” the jungle, not right off the bat.

/signed

I could understand the overall difficulty nerf before the core game’s release; I didn’t agree with it but I could see how some new people could be frustrated by dying at the early levels.

But Heart of Thorns is supposed to focus on the end game, and I sincerely hope that isn’t limited to raids. The open world and the story is made for level 80s, for people who already know their profession, it should not be training grounds for new players anymore but rather training grounds for the more challenging content.

BWE2 balance was great, it was finally decently challenging and you couldn’t just faceroll everything. The threat of the snipers in the story mission was huge, but if you managed to beat them without dying, it felt great; you actually had to think how to deal with them, now you just press buttons randomly, again, and things die.

What you’ve done now is removed any sense of challenge from the story and open world, and suddenly the map feels much less enjoyable, and I’m not as excited for the expansion as I was before. I tried the dragonhunter and went afk in a spot while forgetting that a veteran beetle spawns there; when I came back, he was attacking me but I stayed at full health. This definitely wouldn’t have happened last time, and it definitely should not happen at release.

tl;dr: Bring back BWE2 balance, we’ve had enough facerolling enemies until now.

I just miss the difficulty. Not having gliding is fine, I understand why I can’t glide right this instant. But the lack of difficulty just makes me sad, because I don’t know if it’ll change. The first two weekends were great, I had to use all my abilities, I was rewarded for using defensive abilities and gear, and monsters felt like actual threats, rather than just things I bump into on the way to somewhere else.

Yeah…they nerfed alot of enemies..i remember when those red frogs were alot harder..i do not like that….at all… :\ please anet….do not make this like the core game….press 1 to win..