Guild Wars 2

late to the party

My Sylvari elementalist is dark-ish red, and pouty looking

my other sylvari, non elementalist, is a mustard yellow so not as dark

I just want a pet ooze

I suspect the game is still too new and in flux for the all the game mechanisms to be understood – at least if the guesses and arguments in the class forums are to be believed.

This game has plenty to reward casual and mid-core gamers. The casual people can follow the personal story and the map highlights (get all the viewpoints and hearts etc.) and that is already a huge and fun game.
Then there is exploring, world events, crafting and the story mode dungeons.
So I agree that there needs to be a part in the dungeons that is elite – but that it ought to be fun.

I always hated the dungeons which had to be won by reading up the “formula” and repeating it until perfect, that is not elite and it is not fun except for a small number of people (and I suspect these have been trained into this way of gaming by a large number of games in the past, rather than because it truly is fun). It’s much more interesting if the dungeon can be won by understanding the mechanisms, your class, your build and that of the other people you play with, and tactics.

So If i get a random group and go in a dungeon i understand i wont have much fun?

nysta – I like the idea of more randomness – the rogue-alike way to make things hard. You can beat it easy one time, and the next time you try fail at the first door, because the random threw you a curve ball. It would be about skill, improvisation and teamwork – but want to bet the “hardcore” would complain? Because that’s not what they want, they want predictable rewards. They want to know that if they do this build and play this way 400 times they’ll have the stuff they want. They too want it easy – they hate if anything nerfs their play making it more of a challenge! – but they want it exclusive. And the exclusion is based on the time and dedication and forum reading.

In part I often jokingly say that it is because they are still at school or close to having been at school or nostalgic for school: read up, study, rehearse, learn by heart, repeat what you learned, get rewards.

I’m… mid-core.. Been a gamer for a long time but even when I had lots of time I was mid-core. I want my games to be challenging, I want to be good at them but that it take some thinking and effort (not just the stamp collecting some casual games are), but more than anything, I want it to be interesting. I hated the “learn by heart” part of school and really don’t want my time wasted like that by a game. Gave up on many a (single player) game if it stuck me at a boss which needed to be learned by heart by doing the same thing over and over 300 times until you got the whole chain right. There’s always another game, or a book, or, if I wanted to do something repetitive, there was always school work or chores.

Mid core, I think, means someone who gets into games a lot and puts the time and interest in (a lot more than casual players) games and would call themselves a keen gamer, but doesn’t have the “collector/completist” gene or the need for status in game that powers a hardcore gamer. These things just dont bring rewards to a mid core gamer, compared to the emotional and time investment needed – either because they got it out of their system or never had the personality for it.

So as a mid core gamer I don’t want things to be made easier just so everyone can see everything. That would reduce my fun, as I want a challenge and diversity and if everything is a 1-button walk in the park then it is not diverse and not fun. I dont want the “casual” people to have their way if they want everything to be easy.

But I am actually not sure that the people clamoring for easier dungeons are really the casual players (I think they are hardcore players who have rushed and whose skill has yet to develop). Because casual people havent yet made it to the forums to complain. But indeed sooner or later the casual people will demand access to things, once they run out of maps to clear. And hopefully by then there’ll be new things, rather than a nerfing of content. I want dungeons to look forward to doing, not farmville in the catacombs.

I also don’t want the game to change to cater for the hardcore, as defined above. I have seen so many rush by doing all the “visible” things to tick the box and get the achievement/points/xp. Changing the game to provide maximum utility would just be no fun for me.

I think the game is aimed at the mid core gamers like me and I am extremely happy with it There are bugs, quirks, and who knows how well it will hold on through the years, but this is a game that breathes diversity and interestingness, and rewards diversity and curiosity.

While the hardcore rush around I also notice that people seem to miss events that aren’t marked on the map. No heart, not little “here’s an NPC waiting for a trigger” sign and yet there are many surprise events around, plus chains which I haven’t yet seen triggered the whole way, and paths in event chains never taken that sometimes bring bigger events… The casual don’t have the experience to necessarily find those, the hardcore run past, so it is all been put here lovingly for the different kind of mid core players – the explorer, the crafter, the gatherer, even the ghost farmer or the roleplayer. Or the one who talks to all the NPCs, like me

So if the major worry is around the dungeons, making them more random, perhaps in response to a level of skill (self selected or measured) or some guild setting, would allow the dungeons to cater to more styles at the same time. And the rewards could still be different so that the hard core has something to show for their time. That too is only fair!

On an ironic note, if you go look in other class forums everyone who posts in the forum seems to think their class is the worst and bugged etc.

People in the elem forum claim other classes can kill in 1-2 skills when it takes them longer. They say “how come a necro can kill an elementalist just with the basic scepter skill?”
People in the engineer forum saying their class feels sub par in PVP and PVE.
People in the mesmer forum saying they feel useless in PVE

Maybe it’s just that we’re good at overestimating how “easy” it is for the others, because we notice the times where they get everything right and a bit of luck and they down a whole group in 3 skills, and we don’t notice the other 99% of the time when they bumble about like everyone else?

The jagged horrors are an absolute puzzle to me – what good were they supposed to be? Yes, they can devert aggro for a few seconds, but if you are moving they just fall so far behind while spawning it isnt even funny. Then they drop dead immediately (it seems) while continuing to lose health after death.

And I can imagine how annoying they will be in pvp to get enemies out of downed state!

Still, they must have thought it would work out useful, right? So did it mesh with other minion skills/traits (which perhaps were changed) to suddenly become useful? Or is it just a joke/looks thing?

Yeah, that’s how I interpret it: they could fix a lot of the small broken traits and skill aspects but that wouldn’t really do all that much. They must know they nerfed the necro too much since the beta weekends, and they must be figuring out what to revert, whether to do some new traits etc. and it will take a bit of time until they check the balance of it all.
After all they woudlnt want to make another round of changes that turns out to not work, would they?

Although when I am reading other forums I see a lot of people saying dungeons are too easy, not enough of a challenge etc. so perhaps the mistake isnt that the necro isn’t powerful enough but that too many of the other classes turned out to be too easy

Konrad Curze.5130:

honestly, a warrior can walk into a group of mobs, press ONE low cd skill, and not even 3 seconds later they all are dead in front of him.
the necro needs like 10 more seconds and 5-7 more skills/button presses to do that. and in that time he has taken quite more damage
(…)
so the warriors’ survivality is flat out higher by definition, and with far, far less annoyances in the form of more key presses, slowly building conditions, combos

I agree the necro needs some love, so many traits are just puzzling (=I cant figure out what good they might do in real game use)

But when I read this I think the warrior bit sounds just boring. If the game was walk into groups of mobs, press one key, walk to next group of mobs, press one key – it wouldn’t be much of a game.

Maybe that’s why I’m bumbling around with a necromancer