Guild Wars 2

Gaining a few levels makes sense for certain parts of the personal story, when you unlock some new thing by being level <x>. For example, playing a mission recommended for level 39 at level 40 gives you an appreciable advantage because now you have access to spending 20 points in trait lines. That’s definitely a tactic I’ve taken advantage of when I could.

In general, though, downscaling means that levels themselves and even better equipment don’t make a major difference. I’ve done some personal story missions cooperatively with other people purely for fun, and some of us brought along level 80 characters with exotics, etc. The difference between that and people at the expected level is…not that great. Playing poorly still gets you killed quick, and enemies don’t just instantly die to autoattacks. So leveling and better gear will tip you over the top if you’re almost there, but it won’t get you up the mountain on its own. A better general piece of advice is reminding people that unless they’ve been gearing up as they go along, probably over half of their equipment is quite outdated at any one time…unless they are just super lucky with drops. There is, fortunately, no upscaling in the personal story to compensate for poor gear.

I guess that’s a broader GW2 complaint though: even all the way up until 80, gear just isn’t very important to replace while leveling. Unless they’re flat-out naked, any profession can easily complete renown hearts, and dynamics events are still perfectly doable most of the time, just by relying on random drops the game gives you. Let’s not even mention people who level entirely through crafting or WvW – they may still be wearing Starter stuff. When it comes to the instances, though – personal story and dungeons – suddenly it becomes readily apparent that gear is way out of date, and it’s probably a rude awakening to some people. Being a better player can somewhat make up for poor armor, but it can’t make up for your weapons/gear stats which comprise your damage. And as I mentioned in a previous post, you’re the only damage in personal story most of the time.

I don’t think that the personal story should be tuned down to match the very low difficulty of general PvE, but at the same time I think it would be bad to across-the-board increase the difficulty of general PvE to that of the personal story (or even dungeons). It’s really more of a marketing/image/perception problem than anything else. The average player going through the game for the first time is given the impression that the personal story is just another part of general PvE, not requiring any special preparation on their part to complete. Depending on lots of variables, this may turn out to be the case and they have fun or steamroll through it or whatever. But as plenty of people report all the time, for some players the personal story is just an exercise in frustration. I hate to use a cliche phrase twice, but it becomes “Ascalon Catacombs Syndrome”, where people try the personal story once, find it so hard/not fun that they quit, and then they never touch that entire aspect of the game ever again. And that’s really a shame because it’s a good chunk of wasted developer time, not to mention some of the missions are legitimately super fun. (Air Drop – that prototype golem thing was just hilariously powerful.)

So yeah, I don’t really know what to say. Holding the player’s hand and coddling them (e.g. explicit reminders to gear up) makes for a poorer overall playerbase. On the other hand, it’s hard to blame the “bad” players for “whining” when general PvE is so easy overall that you don’t even need to do simple things like gear up to win, not to mention the slightly more difficult things like actually thinking about your traits, stat spread, etc. This is a balancing act that Anet will have to work out one way or another; I just hope they don’t fall too heavily on either extreme, since there are deeply entrenched camps on both sides.

As of right now, this skill challenge is not working on my server anymore. It didn’t used to be broken – I completed it on another character a while ago, like over a week prior. Stormbluff Isle server.

The odd thing is that the monster is spawned and it’s attackable…but there is no way to reach it except with a ranged attack, and it goes invulnerable after 1-2 hits. I don’t remember how this skill challenge is supposed to work, but I bet the Hylek isn’t supposed to hide inside the rock enclosure. I do wonder if I could get the skill point by killing it in one blow, though. The other three adds that spawn along with the veteran are listed as dead, so maybe it was partially working earlier?

Well, I’ll just wait until the next server reset and pray that I can get back before it bugs again, I guess…

I don’t agree with anyone that says waypoint travel is too expensive in this game (and that’s coming from an 80 who travels from one side of the map to the other – Orr to Black Citadel, Divinity’s Reach to Fireheart Rise, etc.), since I have plenty of money for travel on all of my characters…I don’t even make an effort at earning money, although I’ll admit I also don’t spend it while leveling on anything other than salvage kits etc. either.

More to the point, though: I do have the same issue, although with a different strech of the storyline…I’m not happy with Human 20-30, where you meet the Orders. It might be the same with other races but I can’t confirm that.

The first mission you’re sent out to Kessex Hills just so you can talk to the Order representatives in a tent. You don’t actually do anything there. Yes, I get that it’s close to the swamp you’re about to do things in, but still…the swamp is outside the boundaries of the instance anyway. The next three missions, you’re doing stuff around Kessex Hills. However, inexplicably and for no good reason, after every one you are sent back to the Salma District…for the sole purpose of talking to the Order representatives again. What happened to that tent? Or why couldn’t I meet them in the Salma District for the first mission? Logan is there too, but it’s not like it’s unusual for him to go to other areas; he does it plenty of times at other points in the story. The final mission conveniently takes place in the throne room, so I don’t need to pay for travel or anything, but the rest are just…argh.

In every other chapter of the personal story that I have played through, the locations I had to travel to were picked with legitimate and justifiable reasons. Later on there’s a lot of back-and-forth to Fort Trinity too, but that I can at least understand; Trahearne, being the Marshal and all, can’t exacty up and leave whenever he feels like it, and there aren’t too many other safe places in Orr anyway. But the Human 20-30 series just baffles me. Those Orders representatives aren’t even particularly important people; they completely disappear after finishing the chapter, and even within their Orders they aren’t high-ranking. Why do they need me to travel all the way back to Salma District?

“Equal risk/effort should result in equal rewards”. That’s part of my own game design philosophy; while there’s no such thing as a perfectly balanced game, it’s not okay when some professions just coast through content without even trying and others have to fight tooth and nail to do the same thing. The only exception is when the additional challenge has extra rewards, such as being fun in and of itself, or giving better loot – but the personal story rewards are static, and unless you’re a bit of a masochist, the extra hassle of Thieves in the personal story is not fun either. I’m all for “hard mode” type content, where I can choose to increase the difficulty if I want to; it shouldn’t be a punishment forced on me just because of the profession I choose to play. I mean, that almost makes sense in other games with a so-called “trinity”. When I play Final Fantasy and set up my party consisting of entirely Black Mages, I know I’m in for a challenge because I have a very one-sided team and the game was not designed to be (easily) beatable that way. But the whole premise of Guild Wars 2 is that every profession has a little bit of everything – offense, defense, support, healing, whatever – so even though some professions are better at some things, no profession is supposed to be forced into one particular build/role because that’s all they can do.

And the Thief does have a lot of different offensive and defensive options. I’m just saying that the unique setup of the personal story frequently negates the best of them. (I hear Elementalist has it even worse, though, and I sincerely feel for those people, since I thought I had it pretty hard.)

The quote button is missing for me right now, which is unfortunate, so: Averis, that’s exactly what I had to fall back on a lot of the time too. The trouble with that tactic, though, is that in some missions I could really only make progress every 180 seconds while waiting for Thieves Guild to recharge. Ambush Trap alone isn’t really enough. It’s hard to pinpoint specific cases, too, because it honestly depended entirely on aggro luck. Some missions had tons of enemies and yet they mostly ignored me, so in those cases I switched back to Dagger Storm. Other times there were just a few foes, but for some reason they really wanted to kill me, and I seriously needed all the NPC help I could get. I had to retry a few missions due to bugs, but even on a repeat the outcome would be totally different.

It’s not even that I mind playing slow, or playing ranged on my Thief (I like bows/guns), but it’s totally inefficient compared to doing the exact same missions on my identically geared Ranger, who has dedicated pets and much better ranged damage anyway. It’s true that Ranger has significantly more health, better healing options, and better Downed state (for personal story anyway), and it’s true that I know the game a lot better now.

But still… it’s discouraging when I play on my Ranger and just steamroll my way through every personal story mission, knowing that these same missions were hour-plus tests of skill/patience for my Thief. I’m not using hyperbole either. On my Thief, I had to carefully manage my pulls and try my best to only fight a few enemies at a time, or I’d die/have to run away no matter how well I fought. And forget about boss fights: if I couldn’t get Trahearne or someone else to tank, I was reduced to running around in circles and plinking at the foe with my shortbow/pistol for very minor damage, while spending most of my initiative on defensive skills.

My Ranger doesn’t care at all about pulls. I just fire Barrage and hit as many things as possible, and it doesn’t even matter if there are Veteran Risen Abominations or whatever. I know I can beat them, even if I change to melee and don’t kite. Half the time I’m not even using any of my utility skills or my elite because I don’t need to. It’s not like Thief where I have to use every trick in the book, including spamming my panic button elite, just to stay alive, much less kill things reasonably quickly.

I dunno. Maybe Ranger is just one of the best classes for the personal story or something; I haven’t played other professions far enough to be able to comment on that. But the huge disparity in difficulty leads me to believe that there’s at least something to the opinion that Thieves are unfairly shafted during the personal story. At the very least, I think it’s perfectly valid to warn first-time players that Thief isn’t the easiest PvE profession.

Oh yeah, one more thing I wanted to mention: one of the problems with GW2 PVE overall, which is especially notable in the personal story, is that player damage is ridiculously high compared to NPC damage. (I’m not counting WvW because it’s different there – Keep Lords etc. can actually hurt you.) NPCs are mostly fairly sturdy in terms of armor and health pools, but because their AI is generally not very smart – e.g. don’t dodge ever, don’t move out of AoE, etc – they still get killed off pretty easily, even a lot of the veteran/champion/legendary ones. Therefore, it would help if their damage could be uptuned somewhat – that way at least the enemies would be weaked a bit before the NPCs die. Sayeh al’Rajihd is a good example of an NPC that can actually hurt things, although in her case I’d say she is too strong, since she can quite easily solo the entire mission for you.

Moreover, you can’t revive a lot of NPCs – or even if you can, they often die in such a bad position that it’s suicidal to try and revive them. It just baffles me when I see a single Risen Thrall, at my level, being beat on by a dozen Vigil soldiers, also at my level. I can take it out in like 10 seconds but it takes them a minute or more… I know that this is intended behavior in some missions (Battle of Claw Island), but in others it seems rather unfair (Estate of Decay) because you’re badly outnumbered/up against quite powerful foes and could really use the help. Yes, I’m exaggerating a little, but you get the point.

It’s not a problem if the build I’m playing has so much healing or support so that these NPCs don’t die in the first place, or if I am able to deal so much damage (without dying myself) that it more than compensates for their lack of it. Unfortunately there are a good number of incompatible builds out there, and I get the feeling that the average player does not appreciate having to swap their traits (and possibly even buy new skills/equipment) just to complete the personal story.

I still think that “Unacceptable” is a rather harsh and strong term to use, though. It’s okay to be upset about a game’s difficulty, but consider whether you’d honestly use that phrase in real life to a developer’s face.

Summary of my thoughts: personal story is especially challenging to new players, and some professions are ill-suited for it, but other than fixing the legitimate bugs (Sovereign Eye of Zhaitan) and tuning the (imo) brokenly difficult parts (Mouth of Zhaitan), the overall challenge is about right. I do feel that new players should get a bigger warning about what they’re getting into, though, because it’s “Ascalon Catacombs Syndrome” – try one part of the game that’s supposed to be “introductory”, get yourkitten kicked, and never go there again. This is part of a larger overall trend that GW2 isn’t very good at teaching you how to play the game well, though, so I won’t get into that here.

Anyway, my conclusion after leveling my Human Thief to 80 and finishing the personal story is this: The difficulty of the personal story missions is largely profession-based, and only somewhat related to skill/build/equipment/etc. Thief happens to be one of the worst professions for doing the personal story, period, a topic I wrote about in great length on the wiki and will probably continue to in the future. That being said, a lot of the challenge can be circumvented with prior knowledge of the missions. Unfortunately the wiki is extremely lacking in this department, and while it’s not hard to write even just a simple walkthrough, I find that actually playing GW2 is more fun that documenting it. Perfectly understandable, right?

Here’s a little background: Thief was my first character and the only thing I played during the beta events etc. While I did a little research on my profession, I never looked at forums or elsewhere for help or support; I made my own builds and tried to figure out better ways to do things on my own. I didn’t bother gearing up at any point on the way to 80 – I just used whatever random junk I got as drops, things that were often several levels under me. Heck, I didn’t even buy gear from vendors or karma merchants. I wanted to get the personal story done as fast as possible, so I went into all missions at the appropriate level (maybe 1-2 above or below sometimes, legit don’t remember).

Probably the biggest mistake I made was putting 10 into every trait line up until I hit 60. I had thought I could just buy the Grandmaster manual and save a gold, but sadly that was not the case, so from level 40-60 I had been running around fairly underpowered.

Anyway, my point is that I was an average, if not downright bad, player. Since I came from World of Warcraft, GW2 combat was entirely new to me and I’m still getting used to it. The combination made my experience not too pretty: being both new and bad at the game, plus playing a profession that is particularly disadvantaged for this style of play.

Overall, I’d say that the personal story is…unfriendly to first-playthrough characters, and downright not fun to do as a Thief, even if I’d known every mission ahead of time. For comparison, I’ve been leveling my Ranger and also playing personal story at appropriate level, without gearing up or anything; I just hit 60. The experience has been WAY easier, and that difference can’t all be attributed to me simply learning the game better and knowing some of the missions beforehand (I made different story choices, so there are some new missions).

Still, I want to make this clear: I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve died in personal story missions, across all six of my characters. Yes, they can be hard, and yes, some are downright bugged or otherwise artificially hard in ways that players can’t do anything about. (The Greater Good is a fantastic example and I’m glad that’s been tuned – that was legit almost impossible for my Warrior to complete, even playing ranged and with a level 80 Thief helping me. There are just too many enemies there that have devastating AoE attacks, and the Seraph don’t dodge them at all. If they could be revived, that would be one thing, but they can’t.) But I can’t relate to people who are saying they can only beat these missions by chain-rezzing, that they die so much all their armor breaks, etc etc. I’m not going to call such people bad players, because I myself am still a pretty bad player – but are we even playing the same game?

Maybe I just got really lucky or made good storyline decisions? I’m willing to share my build and the storyline choices I made, but this post is already long.