Guild Wars 2

I have to say my impression of the NPE actually got worse after I snagged a new account during the 75% off sale. Something about seeing all those account-wide locked content in addition to the whole “first 30 levels of every character is a tutorial” thing just made the game feel much more more restrictive and less enjoyable.

Maybe it’s just because I already knew what I was missing, but I honestly don’t think I would have stayed (much less made 8 characters) in GW2 if the NPE was my very first experience – and was my experience every time I deleted and remade a character (which I did a lot when I started).

Player.2475:

Now… months after the September Feature Pack, I tried leveling a character to level 20 and it feels like passing a kidney stone and getting a root canal at the same time when I compare it to how it was before.

Oh, please. You at least get some decent meds when you’re passing a stone or getting a root canal. You can’t really compare the two.

Try being an actual new player. You won’t even see Vistas, won’t get to Spvp till level 24, unlock activities at 40, etc
It’s so funny that it’s sad.

Vayne.8563:

I’ve leveled several characters now in the new NPE. I don’t like the new trait system and I don’t like the way that the story has been broken after level 70, but the rest of the NPE I don’t mind. And I like the leveling rewards. I find it quite fast and painless to get to level 15 now, it’s much faster than it was before.

Summary for the purpose of reflection:

I don’t like (trait system)
I don’t like (broken story)
I don’t mind (the rest)
I like (the rewards)
I find it quite fast and painless (going to level 15/80)

Would you consider this a positive reaction to this NPE?

Vayne.8563:

While I agree that the OP is entitled to his opinion, it is my belief that he’s making a mountain out of a molehill…which is, of course, only my opinion.

Just as a thought: Tripping over molehills regularly might end up feeling like climbing a mountain.

I share your disappointment regarding the NPE. The leveling experience has changed for the worse (in my opinion).

I suggest you do what I did.

Get over it.

Levels 1-20 has always been the worst in GW2. Its horrible. Hell I would even extend that to level 30, then it start to become fun.

Well, except the endgame at 60-80 is now as horrible as 1-20 because nothing makes sense anymore. Anet has shuffled around story missions so much there is no continuity.

Oh well. The game had potential. It was fun while it lasted.
Yet another example of devs ruining the game by fixing things that aren’t broken by changing them entirely instead of just tweaking.

I had leveled several characters to 80 before the infamous September Feature Pack, some even after the horrible trait system changes, and it was pretty nice and enjoyable, though a bit more tedious with the changes.

Now… months after the September Feature Pack, I tried leveling a character to level 20 and it feels like passing a kidney stone and getting a root canal at the same time when I compare it to how it was before.

So boring, such a grind with very limited option. Especially the first few levels. Like the game is really trying to reel me in with amazing abilities like… auto-attacking.

Has Anet said anything about fixing this horrible mistake of a patch, or will they continue steering Guild Wars 2 from being the game that brought something truly new to the table, or will it become just like another Korean trash MMO or WoW clone with all the level-gating and grinding?
Or at least make the skill and feature unlocks account-wide since even a person with low IQ could probably figure it out by the time they make a second character?

Especially veterans that have dozens of characters and do not need the game to treat them like it is their first time playing. Granted, they can use a level 20 scroll, but why waste a scroll on a character just so you can find out if you will like their basic skills?

If you set your content guide (F11) to disable events and personal story it will point you toward map completion goals. It should direct you to that missing POI.

Corana.9837:

[sic]

I like almost everything you posted here. Good organized constructive criticism.

The one thing I disagree is with the story’s current gating system that you listed as a good thing. I’d prefer it how it was, unlocked at all times, with the recommended level on red, should you be below it. Also, the exotic reward seems a bit too much, since you get to pick a Pact rare weapon. But i could live with that.

Someone argued that people would not give up on this system because of the (flashy and pointless) loot rewards you get on some levels. Might I point out that mobs within the story instances used to drop loot? Right. They did. Might as well leave those fake rewards behind and put it how it was.

You know. When it was good?

The intention of the New Players Experience is good but as others have mentioned the implementation of it is lacking. I have recently created multiple characters to check experience the NPE and there are some good and some bad things about it.

Good Things - Bundling of the personal story so each arc can be started and finished at a specific level. The dodge tutorial to get the chest in beginning areas was entertaining as well.

Bad Things - Level gating of all underwater, downed and regular skills. The removal of content throughout the beginning areas and the removal of the “Greatest Fear” story arc. No sense of progression until the later levels in terms of character abilities.

New Player Experience
When I leveled my most recent characters under the NPE I did not find the experience to be enjoyable and I found myself wanting to constantly use Tomes of Knowledge and Experience Scrolls to speed up the process so I could have access to all my skills. Having access to a large amount of skills can be daunting for some people but being locked out of the vast majority of your abilities is boring and only unlocking them after many hours of playing is monotonous.

Greatest Fear story arc. Honestly, the removal of this particular story arc is something I do not mind. The stories were enjoyable as they provided more content and implemented various characters that showed up throughout the arc before culminating in a final battle/episode type thing.

The problem I had with the removal is mostly because without it you progress directly from creating the Pact to the Battle of Fort Trinity. It is jarring because you go from the Pact in its infant stages, discussing the usage of an old ruined fort to be used for the Pact and giving it the name of Fort Trinity, to a finished Fort Trinity. Then another jarring jump to “Against the Corruption” which made me wonder what I missed because the “Greatest Fear” plotline is what provided valuable information, progressed time and eased the story through the major events.

Improvements
Traits – Starting at level 6 and every 6 levels after you get 1 trait point until level 72. Then 1 trait point at level 76 and level 80. At level 40 you unlock Master level traits/trait area and at level 80 you unlock the Grandmaster traits/trait area.

Equipment – At level 10 and every 10 levels after the player can choose 1 piece of Masterwork armor with stats of the player’s choosing. This piece of equipment will level with the character with its stats being updated every 10 levels. At level 70 and level 80 the player instead chooses 1 Exotic Weapon with the stats of their choosing.

Beginning Personal Story Area – For example, the Sylvari “Dream”, the Norn “Great Hunt”, the Charr “Ghost Battle”, the Human “Centaur Raid” and the Asura “Inquest Attack”. Expand this area slightly by having a calm before the storm type scenario where the storm is the events your character is plopped into after the beginning cutscene.

Basically, place 1 Vista, 1 Point of Interest, 1 Skill Point Challenge and the Dodging tutorial thing in that area. Create a few dialogue options with various npc’s in that instance to give it a Guild Wars 1 Pre-Searing feel to it. Use prompts and NPC’s so that a player can discover the PoI, complete the Skill Point Challenge, the Dodging tutorial and when the player completes the Vista events will progress to the existing events.

Such as a Human player seeing the Centaurs coming, Sylvari players seeing the first boss from a distance with Nightmare hounds approaching and the Asura seeing the Golems attacking when they use the Vista. With the Charr simply have them in the bar or training area with their warband, talking with them and so on and when they progress to the Vista have them see the ghosts start attacking and the Norn area only needs a skill point challenge, PoI, the dodging tutorial and a Vista as it is already a calm type of scenario.

Personal Story – Everyone: Use the Living Story Season progression method and allow a player to replay the Personal Story events that they have already completed. Additionally, include the Story part of the dungeons to be included as a side-quest/part of the Personal Story at the appropriate levels without requiring a party of other players to complete it.

Essentially, this means improving the npc’s in the Story-map of the dungeons only. Explorable dungeon maps will remain untouched. Finally, do the same thing with the Victory or Death dungeon and final battle. This is mainly to allow players to experience the entire story at their own pace while still having the opportunity to invite others into the story if they wish. Explorable dungeons, Fractals, World-events and everything else would still require other players of course.

Re: Post I made—

Suggestion to improve immersion in NPE:

Instead of the current pop-up window which knocks out immersion—

have a quaggan materialize next to the player with a gift box in hand in a magical light.

Quaggan introduces himself as a peaceful race from the sea that has been attacked often by Kraits, and is happy to see player advancing in skills. He indicates the gift box is from the quaggans for friends.

The Quaggan hopes to one day see the player again in the ocean.

At the same time, an in-game mail appears. Player can click on it and see the gift content. For e.g., a potion, or quaggan-tradtiional food, that will grant skill points, traits, in addition to weapons, armor, etc.

This way when the player finally sees quaggans at their homes, it will bring an arc to a completion. At that time the player may hand in old weapons, armors to any quaggan NPC.

The quaggan will reply: “Thank you for bringing this back. Perhaps we can help a bit more”. The reward for tuning in this armor/weapon can be an exp booster.

I can already think of one QA item that needs to be addressed: (likely more)

When will this quaggan show up? What if the player is in the middle of a combat? Will the quaggan end up talking while the player is busy fighting? Imho, there are multiple ways to handle it that will not break player immersion.

Our current “reward box” pops up frequently mid combat. In the middle of a heated battle with 3 evils, I get a “reward box” that blocks my view of the battle. Another immersion breaking problem.

I really liked the vanilla GW2 where the interface of a reward chest—a beautiful chest at that—floats at the right side of the screen, waiting if the player is busy, enticing the players eye. Whenever that chest comes up on the side, it gave me a feeling I in a beautiful world where riches abound. It made me smile.

That was ANet’s product, based on ANet’s vision.

These days, I do feel a lot of that vision is being dismantled. Care has not be taken with many changes in the game. Including mega-server, when people are having to taxi, when in the middle of wandering around we get a pop up telling us an option to move to another instance.

I’m frustrated at all the things that are making GW2 looking to be a lesser-grade product. The pop-up reward box, and pop-up server change option, are only 2 things that come to mind atm. There are more.

I sincerely hope the QA department will take a stronger inspection on all new changes, to ensure none of it intrudes on immersion.

Immersion is the #1 factor in giving players fun. We play to escape to another world.

Take care, and may the gods of Tyria bless you, ANet original devs. You have a wonderful vision. I’m sincerely impressed with GW2 (ANet vision.) It hurts me to watch it being eroded.

Please think QA, think immersion.

Vayne.8563:

Because that wouldn’t cause your gaming company to go out of business. Some people have not a clue how businesses work. Not a clue.

You are seriously going to try defending the NPE garbage patch and whatever fool(s) implemented it? Stupidity has no limits, it seems…

Once, when I was running a fairly large store as part of a chain, a guy made a mistake that cost the company a couple of thousand dollars. It was an honest mistake, but yeah, it cost us. The district manager told me to fire him. A couple of weeks later, the DM sees him working and says to me, I told you to fire that guy. I told him, fire him? I just spent $2000 TRAINING him.

Nice story. But what does it have to do with the garbage NPE patch we’re discussing?

It’s not like he was ever going to make the same mistake again, so firing him would have been counter productive. By keeping the guy, he became not only a loyal employee but one of my key salespeople. That guy ended up being very loyal, because he knew I didn’t fire him when I could have.

Well, that scenario doesn’t seem to relate to this one at all. We know the NPE wasn’t an accident on their part, it was deliberate. And despite all the ways we’ve pointed out how it’s trash, all they seemed content to do was tweak a few things to try appeasing us, but left most of the new rubbish level-gating in effect.

This was clearly done by someone with influence in the company too, not some low level employee. Yet they seem to have not played their own game, otherwise they’d realize that there was no need for the NPE whatsoever. If people are being overwhelmed by the mechanics, you try to inform them better, not screw over parts of the game that were just fine and then top it with a compass and a dodging tutorial.

(Seriously, they think we don’t know how to use dodge?)

So, not only have they done something that hurts the game, they are continuing to do so despite how we’ve all pointed out how bad it is. Not an “honest mistake” at all. And I’ve yet to see anything good come out of it. People still ask the same questions they always do , and then some.

Firing people who do something that doesn’t work out, particularly something like this which was undoubtedly the work and decision of more than one person, most of these things are doing collaboratively, means firing more than one person. Who replaces those people? Who trains the people that replaces them? What makes you think the next people can do better? Do you know how long this would set back development?

You know what also doesn’t work? Keeping ruinous changes like the NPE in the game and thinking it’ll make things better somehow.

Calling for people to be fired when you don’t know anything about the internal workings of a company isn’t just irresponsible. It’s unwise.

Sitting idly by and letting them drive this game into the ground is even worse. So, is that all you’ve got? I doubt you know anything of ArenaNet’s inner workings either.

You cannot defend the New Player Experience, because almost nothing about it was a good change. It gave us barely anything and took away things that made leveling early on so fun, as well as mucking up the late game Personal Story. If it had been like this when I first started, I most likely wouldn’t have stuck around for as long as I have, nor would I have supported them as much as I had in the past.

Suggestion to improve immersion in NPE:

Instead of the current pop-up window which knocks out immersion—

have a quaggan materialize next to the player with a gift box in hand in a magical light.

Quaggan introduces himself as a peaceful race from the sea that has been attacked often by Kraits, and is happy to see player advancing in skills. He indicates the gift box is from the quaggans for friends.

The Quaggan hopes to one day see the player again in the ocean.

At the same time, an in-game mail appears. Player can click on it and see the gift content. For e.g., a potion, or quaggan-tradtiional food, that will grant skill points, traits, in addition to weapons, armor, etc.

This way when the player finally sees quaggans at their homes, it will bring an arc to a completion. At that time the player may hand in old weapons, armors to any quaggan NPC.

The quaggan will reply: “Thank you for bringing this back. Perhaps we can help a bit more”. The reward for tuning in this armor/weapon can be an exp booster.

BlueOcean.5380:

“Ruinous pile” is the best phrase I’ve seen on this forum to describe NPE.

Frankly if I were the CEO at NCsoft I’d be getting on the phone to find the person responsible, and canning the person who pulled this stunt

It reduced an elegant game to a genre dime-a-dozen FTP with childish “reward” window that looks cheap. Instead of coming into a game world of faraway fantasy, I’m bombarded with this psudo reward, feeling it’s like a “candy” treat to get me to even respond. Mmm, my goal in an RPG is to learn, to feel I’m challenged, to step into a world of wander. Not to be handed “candies”. In the starting days of GW2, under ANet’s vision, what I saw was a world of beauty and wonder. Now I feel I’m reading a cheap romance, starting on page one with some “enticement”. If I want dime store stuff, I’ll go to 100 other FTP games online.

On top of it, the rewards are full of items that are not salvageable, so players need to drag to destroy. So you give candy to players, then expect them to labor to get rid of it.

Ok… I’d be calling the QA dept. Shouldn’t the disposal of these items be a bit more interesting than that? Make the game a world people can sink into, not one of pop-ups?

Like, players may get a quest to turn in the reward to an army officer at his racial city and learn more about how his turning in his old sword can help younger recruits.

It was ANet’s goal to make this a world of living, breathing fantasy where people will always feel they are in-character. I see this NPE is full of “let’s get the player excited about pop up reward”, “let’s have them drag it to destroy it for our in-game economy.”

Meanwhile, ANet’s vision is utterly being torn apart.

Sigh. If you hope GW2 will become a unforgetable chapter in MMORPG history, as I felt it could be, then don’t do things like this to tear it down, to bring it down to the level of all the cheap FTP games out there.

I’m pretty furious right now. Yes, if I were the CEO I’d be canning people atm.

Whoever was in charge should’ve been told to go right back to the drawing board or just get fired for sheer stupidity. But of course, someone’s going to whine at me for that sentiment. Anyways, +50 for your post….if I could do that.

Feonix.4790:

Warning: incoming long post.

I’ve been ranting about how great Guild Wars 2 is at work for months now, and after the expansion was announced, I managed to convince several of my friends and co-workers to pick up the game.

Playing with new players used to be easy. It was a great way to show them the ropes, explaining things along the way while my character is leveled down to their content. Now, it’s a hassle, because I have no idea what the game has explained, what the game has explained poorly, and what the game hasn’t even tried to explain because it’s level-gated.

I.E. this situation: “What’s this?” “Oh, it’s a skill challenge. If you go up to this thing and complete a challenge, you get a skill point which you can spend to unlock new skills.” Then we go over to it and 3 people all tell me nothing happens when they click on it, because it turns out they haven’t unlocked skill points yet.

This happened over 20 times throughout the course of the night. Skill points. Rallying. Underwater combat. Even salvaging! It was honestly very frustrating for my friends who were told Guild Wars 2 was this rich, immersive experience, and now they feel like the game is treating them like an idiot because the game doesn’t think that they’ll “get it”.

Meanwhile, once they’ve unlocked something by leveling up enough, the game just says, “hey, you’ve unlocked this thing,” and that’s IT. Barely any explanation, and they’re left scratching their heads going “… okay?” When veteran players were traveling around learning new things it was very natural and very immersive. We saw a thing we didn’t understand, we investigated or learned through action. Now the game has a big pop-up that says “Hey, by the way, now all of a sudden when you die there’s this downed state and you can rally. Have fun!” and players are just left confused.

Now there are certain things that I do like about the NPE. I like that they’re getting loot every time they level up. That’s a nice touch that they seemed to appreciate. I like that it’s telling them they’re getting stat increases, or unlocking things like utility skill slots. But when you put huge parts of the game behind a level gate, it creates the illusion that there’s nothing going on in the game. No personal story until level 10 means that for the first few hours of the game players legitimately think the game has no story at all. Things I overheard with my new group: “Is this (renown hearts) all we do?” “What happened with that stuff from my intro?” No major game systems like traits or skill points creates the illusion that players have absolutely no choice over their abilities. “… So I have 3 abilities, is that it?” “When do I get to level up? (said by somebody at level 8)”

Meanwhile, my only response to these kinds of comments is “Keep playing! It gets better.” And it does, truthfully. But you have to hold a new player’s attention all the way until level 31 for them to unlock every major thing the game has to offer, and honestly that’s a long kitten time to try to convince a new player that your game is good. I am prodding my friends to keep playing until the game “gets great”, but I’m left wondering – why did this even need to happen? When I turned on Guild Wars 2 for the first time I thought it was great from moment 1. Now it’s a game that “gets better” after you play it for 10 hours.

Thanks for reading. I hope this feedback from my real-life experiences with new players helps to drive Guild Wars 2 to become an even better game. We’re going to have a LOT of new players with news of an expansion, and if we want to keep them, I think changes need to be made.

TL;DR: Brought some friends into the fold. The NPE doesn’t help to explain anything to them and only serves to frustrate them (and me) by gating major systems – including the kitten plot – behind a level wall, forcing them to play for many hours before the game actually becomes fun. It should just be fun right out of the gate, like it used to be.

This. So much this.

We bought a new GW2 account over the last weekend and, holy cow! The NPE is just awful for anyone who already knows how the game is played. All this level gating and hand holding is a huge pain.

I really wish there was some way to let me be treated as an experienced player though the account itself is new.

I just wanted to add my voice: I second pretty much everything those who disagree with the update. This needs to be fixed.

The New Player Experience patch was a ruinous pile of level gating and scrambling of the late Personal Story chapters. The compass part is seemingly the only good part — every other part could’ve been removed. Between this and the trait patch that they bungled, early leveling isn’t fun at all now.

If GW2 was a Subscription based game, I wonder how many people would have unsubbed when the New trait system hit… I wonder how many more would have unsubbed when the NPE came out… But the game isn’t sub based, so here we are.
I wonder how many pages this thread will reach before they start listening to our feedback.

I truly wish NCSoft will stop meddling with ANet’s vision. Doing so will only result in NCSoft losing a good product, and it will have nobody to blame but itself.

I ended up reinstalling GW2 after hearing of the expansion pack – started up a new char to get back into the hang of things and ran smack dab into the NPE stuff. Read through the thread here and decided you know what… I’ll give it a try, I probably nead to re-learn some stuff anyway.

I think I can see what they were trying to do…. but they really just dropped the ball with it. Especially when you add in the trait changes, though I’m not going to harp on about them. Most of what I want to say has already been said, and likely ignored by Anet, so I’ll try and keep this brief.

The dodging tutorial was really good – I really think that this NPE would have been fairly good and even great if they had built it into things like that and kept it generally within the starting zones. If they had condensed down this whole NPE system and its gates if that makes sense. I’ve played games like that and haven’t had any problems with those systems, in part because it felt like I was unlocking things at fairly or relatively rapid pace.

Instead it feels like a lot of basic stuff is being given to me by an eye-dropper over far too large a span of “levels.” I’m playing through the starting zones on my new character and I find myself wondering what hooked me on this game back when I first played in the betas. Even with the faster leveling pace rushing me through the starting zones it just feels like there’s no hook in the opening part of the game. It just feels like another generic MMO with “quests” of go kill 20 of this mob using these 2 skills. This is especially true with the personal story starting at ten and other changes – such as those to the hearts.

Honestly if they were going to go this far on changes maybe they should have taken it a step further and made further changes to make it fit in better. Its rather annoying to see those lost trinkets and be unable to do anything with them, to see that skill point and know I’m going to have backtrack to get it when the game finally allows me to do things, etc. Everything used to flow fairly or at least somewhat smoothly and it just doesn’t anymore.

Frankly, I’m looking at the NPE and the changes to the trait system and wondering if I really want to spend my money on this upcoming expansion pack. I’ve heard they are looking at the traits again and I’ll probably stick around to see what they come up with but….

Honestly, the best advice I can give to Anet is to set up some form of a test server. Even if it has to be a closed test server kind of a like closed beta or something along those lines. Maybe even re-introduce those surveys that popped up all the time back in beta. Just get some good solid player feedback before dropping things like this into the live game. There’s a good amount of stuff I like or want to like but its just drowned out by the rest which feels poorly considered and/or poorly handled.

The change a few months back was nice where you could set yourself to show as offline, log off and come back hours later still showing as offline if you just wanted to pop on and do alittle quick TP work/bank/etc without getting into a long conversation with everyone. It seems as of this patch its been bugged up again, if I log off showing offline, and log back in game after say 10 minutes its reset me to show online, if its under this time it seems to still show me as offline. The timing could be off on this, but would appreciate it being fixed back to the way it was.

Still not fixed as of 2015-01-27 patch.

I bought a new account over the weekend. The silliest NPE for me was having to go back to pick up the skill points. Maybe they should move those to a more logical location.

Agree with the above post completely. I used to just make norns for enjoying being thrown into the great hunt immediately after creation, and then just explore/personal story right till lvl 80. It’s much harder now with no ore/lumber/plants in noob area’s (you may not have suspected anet, but these where a good way to earn exp, at low levels, and you removed it). The fun to unlock skills is gone. It’s now behind a huge time wall… Etc. Just wrong.

Feonix.4790:

Warning: incoming long post.

-snip-

TL;DR: Brought some friends into the fold. The NPE doesn’t help to explain anything to them and only serves to frustrate them (and me) by gating major systems – including the kitten plot – behind a level wall, forcing them to play for many hours before the game actually becomes fun. It should just be fun right out of the gate, like it used to be.

I cannot +1 this enough times.

I thought I would provide some feedback.

Since the introduction of the NPE, I have created and brought to level 80 two characters.
My thoughts are going to revolve around just a couple of changes, the ones that impacted me the most.

Firstly, the fact that skills 2-5 (weapon skills) are now unlocked at a certain level, opposed to just using a particular weapon until all of its skills were unlocked.
I am conflicted in regards to this change. While playing, I found myself enjoying this new method more than the previous one (with my very first character, I remember I didn’t like Mace at the time, and didn’t enjoy using it just for the sake of unlocking its skills): it feels convenient to grab a weapon for the first time and see that some of its skills are already unlocked because your level is high enough. On the other hand, I feel that the previous method gave me a better understanding on what every skill did (since I was forced to spend time using that weapon).
So I think that, while my personal experience was better with the new method, maybe the previous one was better for learning.

The second thing I’d like to address is the level gating in the Personal Story. For me this was a bad, bad change. I mentioned leveling both of my NPE characters to 80, what I didn’t mention was that I did it on EotM, and I did it just so that I would be able to play the Personal Story with my own pace.
After finishing a chapter, having to wait for almost 10 levels doesn’t feel great.

The other changes didn’t really impact me personally, not that I can remember at least.

Enough tomes to get instant 80 with my new toon in home town. So for me anet reduces the whole game experience and the content in their game. Couldnt care less.

I tried out the NPE when it first rolled out to see how it felt, but this is the first time I’ve made a new character with the intention of leveling it up and playing it.

Not crazy about the NPE, but mostly minor annoyances and some parts I actually like. I can’t put myself in the mindset of an actual new player. What I found the most annoying, however, was weapon swap. Up to level 10 now and it’s still not available (I know now that going into PvP lobby will fix this before it’s unlocked). I accidentally pulled too many scale and managed to get them all down but one. My pet was dead and it was outhealing the damage my bow could put out. I was cursing knowing that the greatsword in my bag would have finished him off but I … just … couldn’t …. reach it. Gah! It was frustrating long before that, but this was the point I got mad about it.

Just before that I had reached a heart that had underwater tasks and I panicked a little before remembering that I had just gotten my underwater equipment. If I had got to this heart any sooner, I wouldn’t have been able to effectively do it.

TLDR: I think some major combat mechanics are gated for too long.

Also, I really miss unlocking weapons by using them instead of by level (except on an ele :p). And bundles. I can’t tell you how much I freaking LOVED that I could carry big ol’ fish around and feed the baby bears on my first toon. Instantly fell in love with the game hard. Oh well, I still have the screen shots I guess.