Guild Wars 2

I feel like the DE system would be a bit more engaging ArenaNet implemented a sort of instanced mode for the explorable areas where you have to vanquish/complete all of the events on the map (so it’d hearken back to GW1’s vanquish mode or even some dungeons) with a party or a small group, though that might cause some trouble with group events or world boss encounters that generally involve far more than a small party.

I would certainly love to get a small group together to do events all across the map without it becoming a tiresome zergfest, and they could pepper in weapon/armor skin rewards or perhaps even new skills when they’re implemented — although something akin to the whole Signet of Capture deal from GW1 would also be nice, be it from world bosses or events.

Add in a hard mode and I’d be even happier. Maybe an event vanquish mode would help people notice DEs more and give the feedback that the system deserves. Some of these are wonderfully well written at the very least, and deserve some amount of attention (the Enhanced Ettin event in Timberline Falls was actually something that I found really humorous, and I enjoyed completing it).

I sort of agree with OP and what bunch of people have been saying. (I’m on Blackgate which is a fine server and I’ve stuck with it since day one). The game’s advocating of ‘on-the-fly’ grouping and guaranteed co-operation for almost every PvE activity in the game makes the more traditional methods of MMORPG friendships/grouping something that’s not really seen and it’s kind of a shame. I recall during the headstart/release that if I didn’t already have a friend playing with me (a friend, mind you that I already had and was on voice chat and everythinga) I’d sort of mindlessly do hearts and events with other people and not really say anything.

(I will add, mind you, that the BWEs felt a lot livelier and I really enjoyed talking to everybody ever. It was incredibly exciting during those times but who wouldn’t be, really.)

I can recall a few instances where I shared my agony with another player doing a heart that was bugged and took eons to complete, and a few short messages exchanged with a small group that happened to form while doing an event chain but apart from that, nothing really. The same seems to go for dungeons, even if the run is fruitful and we all add each other to our friends list. Inevitably people on my friends list just sort of sit there and a few weeks later I question whether it was a good idea to add them in the first place.

Then again, I didn’t really play GW2 with a huge guild when it started. I stuck with a small group of friends, three of which I’d played GW1 with heavily and the rest were aboard the hype train. It’s also probably a byproduct of my own sort of asocial activity on MMORPGs, since I never feel like it’s a good idea to say LFG or whatever. It’d probably explain my lethargy in GW2 at the moment as well.

I feel for you OP ;_;

I hope we have the chance to choose Faren as our second against the final boss of this storyline.

Personally I’d be satisfied if more elites weren’t viewed as ‘DotA/generic A-RTS ultimate’ and we had a bunch more that weren’t transformations that kind of defeat the purpose of building a certain way, or summons that die in a few seconds. People have said before that a lot of them are too gimmicky and situational, and I totally agree with that.

Adding more elites that were like the ones in Guild Wars — shorter cooldown attacks or special effects relegated to that specific class would be awesome and would greatly help with build creation.

Riel Darkwater

10/10 would waifu

Thanks Colin! Regardless of the immense cynicism on the forums you guys are wonderful and it’s great that you’re doing this all for free.

Thanks again!!

Mira.4906:

The way the maps work Vanquish isn’t practical, especially wouth some of the the champions in orr.

i would suggest that they could do something similar with a Dynamic Event Vanquish where you have to complete every dynamic event in the zone at some point in time to get credit for a vanquish. It could be similar the explorer achievements but would be set up like this:

Queensdale 0/54 Unique Events completed

You know what? I’d actually love that. Instead of Vanquish it’s a ‘vanquish EVENTs’ thingy and each event would give unique loot and would be a lot harder. Not sure how they’d do group events but it’d be awesome none-the-less! Great suggestion! I never thought about it that way since I rarely feel like doing events

I’d say Rytlock because I still hate Logan from his screw-up in Edge of Destiny, which was probably the most beautifully written… thing I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading. SERIOUSLY.

Apart from Logan’s romantic letter to Jennah, that is.

But still, whoever can whirl their weapons in ‘deadly figure eights’ the most is the strongest.

Little Thom, no doubts about it.

Any old-timers remember the incredible blend of swordplay and spell-slinging that was…
HAMSTORM?

He won the Norn fighting tournament in my book, screw the fact that he was an axe warrior as a henchman.

And you know what, I’ll one up that by electing a Wammo of any sort.

I think GW2’s events would have benefited a lot from adopting the PQ system of Warhammer Online, if anybody’s familiar. I really liked the list of player contribution being ranked and subsequently rewarded with items based on how much they contributed to the fight.

As people have said before, with a lot of events giving only the same karma/gold/exp reward (and a few of them spawning chests, obviously) there’s not much incentive to do them. Introducing more unique loot-based rewards, even for smaller events, would be great.

And even though this is only tangentially related, it’d be cool if when doing events with large groups of players you’d sort of get the SPvP-style health bars showing on the left side of your screen for other players in close vicinity as impromptu parties so there would be a distinction between parties and dynamically formed groups that are so touted.

Voonith.2561:

I don’t mean to sound like I’m trolling here, this is a genuine question:
How were so many of you moved by the loss of your mentor?

I do agree they are all better than Trehearne’s arc, but I find all the dialogue so generic and all the character development so rushed and flat that I find it extremely difficult to care for any of these one-dimensional characters.

Not critiquing any of you, I’m curious because I want to understand; because I wish I could be moved by this game the way you are.

I was sort of not so much ‘moved’ as I was disappointed, and I think I was more mourning for what the storyline would become following your respective mentor’s death… (I think I was right to mourn for that)

I think I figured Tybalt/Sieran/Forgal was going to die; my friend pointed out way back during those misty-eyed headstart/release days that when he visited the Chantry of Secrets, Tybalt wasn’t an NPC there. I realized that everybody important either magically vanishes from your storyline, never to return or vanishes in a slightly more permanent way. I knew it was coming!

But what I think why many players are moved is because of the personality quirks and verbal tics (more for Sieran and Tybalt than Forgal, probably) of your mentors… their voice acting, at least to me, was a vast improvement over everybody else you encountered. You became a bit more intimate (no not that way jeez) with your mentor than any other character in your personal story.

Just my silly input!

Yeah for a moment (doing the Order of Whispers storyline again on an alt) I thought all the Ministry Guard had taken more pages out of Caudecus’ book and all went bald.

There’s problems.. not only with the voice acting but just the way cutscenes are delivered with the two characters facing each other and delivering their lines, at times offering awkward silences and interruptions when there are more than two characters speaking. This is just magnified with Trahearne because he’s very flat with his line delivery.

Granted, I’m a bit more receptive to his monotone voice because it’s kind of curiously off for the rather happy-go-lucky Sylvari (contrast with Killeen who was also a Necromancer and was a far more interesting character than Trahearne, at least in my opinion) and could have been interesting if he didn’t keep it throughout THE WHOLE STORY.

I was pretty relieved when he sidled out of the story by its (very) end, and I feel kind of bad for the character because there sort of was some potential, and I’m pretty sure Sylvari players might feel the same way since he’s introduced earlier.

It would’ve been great if his leadership was questioned when he took the reins of the pact, or if he questioned his own capabilities a bit more earnestly instead of… just doing stuff well despite having very little qualifications for leading so many troops from very disparate organizations.

I feel like with the completion of his hunt he needs some drastic change… perhaps some sort of spiraling depression that others have suggested, or some weird descent into madness (…if his VA can pull it off, I’m sure he can! He just needs to try or something!) that ends up intertwining with the next dragon and perhaps some very terrible cleavage/conflict within the pact. Possibly a mutiny that the player fails to stop and ends with his death or something… or permanent incapacitation that leaves him a withered husk of a Sylvari! Or Nightmare Court-age or whatever. I don’t know.

I like to think that my Dervish from GW1 is completely unrelated to my main in GW2, an Ascalonian Elementalist. Instead the old fart in his infinite wisdom foolishly remained in Elona and got killed and raised by Joko as a Mordant Crescent or something silly. Later buddy.

Then my Ele shamelessly looted my Dervish’s hall of monuments and has claimed everything there as his own.

In retrospect my Ele is kind of a jerk.

Doubtful. Combat is too spammy for something like Panic to work, I think. GW1 felt a lot more methodical, so hexes and awesome AoE interrupts like Cry of Pain and Panic were wonderful.

It’s gotten better since the wondrous gift bags, at least for me.

Unfortunately it’s counter-balanced once again by FotM, and as a result lack of players ever doing the Arah event chain to open the dungeon. The gate’s always closed and there are very few groups, if any, that want to do Arah… ever. I’ve sort of put off trying to complete my Arah armour set because nobody ever wants to run it! And I’m not really sure when FotM Fever will ever run dry.

It’s still mind-numbingly frustrating with Lupicus being present on EVERY ROUTE, and running with an inexperienced or just flat-out poor group.

Thanks for the wonderfully written post. I find myself agreeing on a lot of your points (being one of those SNIDE GUILD WARS 1 ANCIENTS), especially with your section on combat and gear progression.

…But I still like to have hope, especially for all the frequent and FREE content updates. I couldn’t play Prophecies without feeling discouraged, possibly because I was complete garbage at it. It took me late into EotN before I was hooked—perhaps because all my friends were playing pretty religiously by that point—but yeah. I think this game will benefit greatly from expansions, be it more skills or dungeons or whatever. I didn’t really ENJOY GW1 until Nightfall, and I didn’t get sucked into it ‘till EotN (but I probably still would’ve hungrily scarfed down Nightfall and Factions if I wasn’t so ronery ;_; at the time).

What I really want right now is more weapon skill customization, and a less kitteny trait system. Seriously, it feels like I’m playing League of Legends again.

Just a small thought from me however, that’s sort of banking on how well-written your post was. If ArenaNet wants to deliver on armour sets being cosmetic only they need to do what DotA2 does: implement a ‘workshop’ where those players that are skilled enough with 3d software and whatnot can create their own armour sets for approval and then they can be sold at the gem store as skins or as drops or whatever! This would be an excellent way to further involve the community and create more gear that’s not based purely on stats. And like in Dota2 the content-creators can get a share of the profits. Come on ArenaNet!

Blaargh, same here, and it’s getting especially frustrating since I’m trying to run Arah explorable.

I saw a Charr named “Neil Catrick Harris” on Blackgate. Or something to that effect.

And a Norn with a very lewd name that I couldn’t recall.

Quaggan are so kitten adorable. (That’s right I censored myself before I got censored, take that). There was no way my main (human) was picking Hylek or Skritt over Quaggan for racial sympathy. They’re too awesome and endearing.

Other than that, Tengu are awesome, I think the Largos are awesome with their butterfly wings and accents and kittenery, and Kodan are great too. I love the newly introduced minor races for the most part.

Now, ArenaNet, all we need now are Mursaat and Margonites and Seers. If any of those are left (and it’d be interesting to see what happened to the Margonites considering they’re ‘sterile’, for lack of a better world, immortal and the Realm of Torment is effectively replaced… and that there were two(?) “good” Margonites).

I hated Logan for the longest time, and I’m blaming that on how awfully Edge of Destiny was written. Seriously, I can’t even.

If he wasn’t voiced by Troy Baker I don’t even know what I’d do

ARGH.

But I was okay with him after CoF.

Great post(s) OP. Though I love Ele to death I’m constantly reminded of a lot of disappointing things… which were reflected very accurately in your posts. Thank you!

I feel another issue to add is that the lack of weapon-swapping restricts Elementalists quite a lot in terms of range… especially in SPvP where you can’t even manually switch weapons after being ‘out-of-combat’ (though I’m sure this is an effort by ANet to prevent gear swapping or any possible exploits related to that).

I’d like our profession much more if we had weapon-swap that shared a cooldown with attunement switching, or was at least dependent on each mechanic (i.e, you can’t switch weapons if you’ve recently switched attunements) or something to that effect. It’s sort of depressing going D/D and feeling kind of useless when your teammates are flinging arrows and bullets at things beyond your reach because you can’t really.. hit anything without diving into the (most probably lethal) fray.

In addition I REALLY dislike Elementalist traits in general, and the fact that Arcane IX (Windborne Dagger) is IX in itself and only gives us 15% movespeed WHILE USING A DAGGER is an awful piece of garbage when thieves can take a dirt-cheap signet that grants them 25% off the bat and an AoE blind… compare Signet of Air. Seriously? What would be nice is if all of our trait lines had some form of synergy bonus with a specific element… it’d add a great amount of depth to choosing which attunement you want to spec in, as well as spicing up the amount of builds you could pursue. Somehow without being overpowered of course but it’d be nice.