Guild Wars 2

Heya. GW1’s pretty different in a lot of respects.

First, it isn’t a true MMO. Think Diablo II or something where you have to create a game instance to run around in, except instead of a chat room as a lobby you have a city where you can manage your characters and stuff. Once you leave these outposts, the game world is instanced to you/your party.

Is it dead? Eh no, but there are significant portions of the map that are going to be virtually deserted.

Solo? Yes, tentatively. In the Nightfall and Eye of the North storylines you pick up a number of “hero” characters, which are basically customizable party members that you can build like your own character. These are NPC controlled though you can micromanage their skills if you want. You’ll probably want to begin with Nightfall or Eye of the North to gain access to these heroes ASAP.

For most parts of the game you’re going to have trouble finding parties just because people aren’t doing those anymore. For others (high-end areas in Nightfall and Eye of the North) it should still be possible to get groups.

Worth buying, eh. It’s pretty clunky compared even to similarly aged games such as WoW. You can’t jump, and the control method seems to almost suit Diablo-style top-down mouse control sometimes.

Not comparable, imo. GW1’s combat has a completely different style to it, as does building the characters. Both good and bad in their own ways.

If you do the campaigns, and hang around long enough to get say, 10 HoM points, you’re probably looking at over a hundred hours of gameplay. The stories generally aren’t amazing, but they provide enough context to keep you pushing through them.

Not feasible. They’d have to come up with dozens and dozens of different sets of stories and dialogues for that, and you can tell by the way it’s implemented that they’d already scaled the current implementation back after level 30 when your race/character creation choices stop mattering.

I mean don’t get me wrong, your idea sure would be cool, and they already know that, it’s just not a realistic one at all.

Even the more reasonable idea of having your previous story characters in your home instance react to your current position in the story ended up being more than the developers were willing to bother with. Though the characters are usually there in the home instance, they don’t say anything. And I think the only one where NPCs react to your story progress is the human home instance from levels 1-30.

The good news is that some of the early storyline characters have been making their way into the living story. Faren had some cool moments in last year’s Crown Pavilion, for example.

We’ll just have to wait and see what future implementations are.

Me personally, I’d like to see a personal story campaign based on the living world season 1. So players that missed those things (and even ones who didn’t) can unlock and play through that campaign after the original one.

It becomes easier to understand and predict the behavior of MMO communities when you think of them as a bunch of (very articulate, but no less annoying) small children whining to their parents.

MAUS HOUS.8047:

Yargesh.4965:

You know that other players can mess with how the aspects work during the race?

Could you specify how? So I can work around it.

Fake powerup crystals. Think Mario Kart. People like to place them on the lightning platforms or on the narrow beams.

To be honest, we’re a little lucky that gem store items are rewarded occasionally.

No, gems are meant to be paid for with cash. If you want gems without paying cash, exchange for gold.

Don’t have to like it, but it is what it is.

These are useful, thanks!

You’re looking for something in a core i5-i7 with Nvidia 750m (or higher) graphics.

I think I’ve seen a couple i7/755m laptops in the $900 range recently. Go dig around. Check manufacturer sites as well.

Teriburger.5186:

It would be nice to charge it up to 500 uses or more and not experience the “oops, forgot to buy” syndrome.

This is the entire reason for the unlimited gathering tools.

I think this has less to do with the content and more to do with you being peeved by the mindset of some of the other players.

Best bet for you is to find a guild of like-minded players and play only with them.

sPvP rewards level up tomes at a passable rate. I realize that’s not everyone’s thing, but doing the sPvP dailies (takes less than an hour usually) will probably net you one every 2-3 days. You could get one in a single more focused play session as well.

Your other options are karma training around edge of the mists, or waiting until the Pavilion fires up and following a zerg with an exp booster equipped.

Of these, the Pavilion is probably the best option if you can make time for playing your alt.

If “endgame” is content that requires a drastically different playstyle than the content you played previously, then no, GW2 has no “endgame”.

Instead, the entire game and all of its various playstyles are available to you during the leveling process. In that regard, the entire game is “endgame”.

Whether you choose to accept this as a positive or negative is entirely up to you as a player.

The thing you have to realize about the negativity is that it’s a community thing, and not at all related to the game. As an example, see every other MMO ever. Yeah, some of those are legitimately bad games, but there’s a ton of great ones too, and ALL of them have this extremely vocal, extremely negative/toxic group that owns the forums about them.

You can’t let that mindset infect you if you want to be anything other than perpetually miserable.

They aren’t going to change it.

Rym.1469:

It’s good that Arabic/African people don’t mind Elona since that’s another mixture.

It’s not even that. Neither Africa nor the Middle East are huge markets for MMOs as far as I know, so it doesn’t matter from a business perspective if the use of their cultures in the visual design offends them.

However, Arenanet is owned by a Korean company and trying to break into a Chinese market. It seems to offend Korean, Chinese, and Japanese people to each be associated with the other, so it hurts the business model to have Cantha as it was in GW1.

On top of that, it’d probably offend NA if Cantha were suddenly not Asian (though, I’d personally love it if the Kurzicks took over and Cantha was all gothic architecture).

In short, Cantha isn’t happening.

One of the only things I miss about GW1’s combat compared to GW2’s is elite skills that were a core part of your build, rather than a gimmick transformation or a short buff you got every third or fourth fight. Yeah, the CCG-style building was nice, but GW2’s skill system works for what it is other than, imo, said elite skills.

Would love to see more 30-60s cooldown elites, even if the system doesn’t go the way of GW1 where elites were often better versions of regular skills.

It still drives me nuts that there’s so much gorgeous lighting stuff going on overhead that’s very easy to miss because of the camera placement and FOV.

I saw the wind catcher buy orders. They’re down to 40g, and I assume most of the ones above that were filled rather than withdrawn.

It makes me wonder if there’s some insider trading going on. Perhaps someone knew the wind catchers were coming back, and that’s why the price spiked so hard in the past month: baiting the buy orders up so they can be filled by some guy who just runs off with the money.

Take that, whoever’s been spiking the wind catcher prices!

Most people with this complaint don’t have their trait yet, and once they do get the trait they stop complaining about this.

Donari.5237:

It apparently is too large a software challenge for their resources. There have been long threads on the issue, with dev response.

They can’t sell it on the gem store; of course they don’t have the resources to spare to it.

Actually, if they did make a chair toy that you could interact with to sit in for like 800 gems, I’m sure people would buy it lol.

If players want to attempt to champ train, that’s fine.

If a smaller group of players sees oak up and decides they wanna take it down, that’s fine.

If it messes up the train, that’s fine too.

Basically no one owns the rights to the events. The train doesn’t get to complain when someone else does an event, and the other players in the zone don’t get to complain when the train does an event.

The train drama sure does make map chat amusing though.

Well, let’s run with the idea.

Why not take a fortress similar to a tower found in WvW and make a survival mode where a party of players have to hold it against increasingly larger numbers of enemies? Siege can be placed, gates and walls repaired and a lord that must be kept alive to keep the game going?

Maybe make a fractal of it, maybe make an activity of it.

Iunno musing over it while I nom a bagel.

No matter how much or how little money is being taken in, resources are best put towards things that make more money. They know about the bugs and the lack of polish in some places. They know some game systems are barely functional (underwater combat).

Fixing those doesn’t bring in more money.

A new armor set on the gem store does bring in money, and living story updates keep people logging in so they see the new armor set on the gem store.

Even if there were subscriptions and even if that brought in money than the current model, they would just turn the extra resources back towards making even more money, something that minor bug fixing and mechanics overhauls will never do.

Solstice.1097:

the flaw is that if skill level and experience aren’t relatively equal then class composition has nothing to do with who wins.

Right, but that did the strategy and skill levels look equal in that tournament? Sure didn’t from where I was sitting.

Solstice.1097:

You are mediocre players and you went up against a good team.

There is no class composition on either side that would have allowed you to win.

So turning that into ANY correlation to what class is OP or not, is just silly.

Here’s the problem. Why is it flawed to say “warriors are not OP because we had three and lost anyway”, but not flawed to say “warriors are OP because some team had two and won a tournament”?

What’s the difference in the logic?

Darnis.4056:

I repeat; Cultural Armor , Karma Armor sets. Karma Weapon Sets, Crafting armor/Weapons, Precursors, other Unique weapons and armor.

Do we just want all the stuff without doing all of the work? Maybe, but we were able to get these things, and now anyone coming in fresh from pve is gonna be like, well great.. you can get skins you could already get in pve but 300 times slower.

Don’t talk about 70% of all skins when you’re only talking about a small number of sets, then. It’s such bad feedback to talk about this great far-reaching problem with the core of the game when all you want is for your norn to be in a thong. As I recall, the difference between cultural T3 in PvE and PvP was only 40 gold anyway, or I guess a ton of rank grinding.

Give the PvE a try. It’s still GW2, it’s fine to play.

a couple hundred of those armor skins are just silly blues and greens with nondescript looks. if you want them so much, go buy them off the trading post for the 1-5 silver that they cost. iirc, you can unlock the blues without binding them to you, so you can sell them right back for the same price.

Just go play the other game. GW2 isn’t subscription, it doesn’t need to keep you here for the sake of keeping you here. Treat it like any other game in your library: play it when you feel like it, set it aside when you don’t.

CptAurellian.9537:

Hell, you can even AFK-facetank a spider queen solo.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but pulling her to that spot is an exploit that prevents her from using her most powerful attack, is it not?

I’ll concede the point when you show me the video of someone facetanking her in the middle of the room she spawns in.

The other classes have been pretty much folded into GW2’s current classes. So if one of GW1’s classes were to be added as a future class in GW2, it would likely be the dervish. More likely, imo, is something entirely new.

That said, I wouldn’t expect to see any additional professions until we see an expansion, and I imagine we’re still years off of an expansion. Don’t get your hopes up.

Although the map design is very theme park, the way you play through them is not.

In other words, just because a zone says X to Y level range doesn’t mean you’re going to go from X to Y level by completing the map. GW2’s built around the idea that you’re going to be doing a bit of everything as you level, which means some exploring, some events, some PvP/WvW, some dungeons, and some personal story to get you through the levels.

Fortunately, you can use any area to gain about the same exp at any level. For example, Queensdale is a popular place to grind from level 70-80 despite it being a level 1-17 zone.

Best advice I can give you? Just play the game and have fun. The levels will come without you having to worry about them.

The sPvP forums are complaining that there’s too much healing, strangely enough.

If you’re expecting to facetank dungeon bosses with healing, that’s not how this game works.

when there’s a delay on this stuff, i always imagine they’re trying to figure out how to make the most money off of it

wouldn’t surprise me at all if you had to buy template slots either on an account wide basis like the bank or per character like bags

kobi.5236:

80 attempts on the great junglewurm ;
40 times defeated

And 2 exotics

200 hours of Organisation , explaining and helping new players that they can defeat it and 2 exotics .

Is this really fun A-net ?

What you’re describing is WoW-style raiding. And the answer is no it’s not fun, so people need to STOP ASKING FOR WOW-STYLE RAIDS IN THIS GAME.

I don’t hate it, but I don’t love it either.

I don’t want the game to go out of its way to paint you as this one-of-a-kind world-saving hero because it cheapens the experience to know that every other player is also that hero. So in that regard I’m okay with the story focusing on others as the hero, and you play your part within that hero’s story.

That said, Trahearne was the most boring of boring characters, and it was lame that he was magically the hero everyone needed without any meaningful struggles or development or anything like that. I’d be okay if that hero character was more interesting and your story weaved in and out with that character’s over your travels.

Unfortunately the initial feedback seemed to be more “I’m not the hero!” than “Trahearne should have been more compelling!” Result will now be that you’re going to single-handedly slay all the dragons and be Tyria’s sole savior, and so will everyone else, which does nothing for either the immersion or the storyline.

Caithe has some compelling moments, for an example of what we should be working more towards. My heart sank in that one mission where you have a vision of Caithe succumbing to Nightmare. There was so much substance to just those few lines of dialogue and it told you so much about the character.

Also, land spears needs to happen.

As far as I know, the devs have expressed more of an interest in adding skillsets to existing weapons rather than making new weapons. I don’t think they said definitively that that’s the plan, but it was mentioned that they’d like for every profession to be able to use every currently existing weapon.

Which, I’d be satisfied with that, and it’d save them on coming up with ten billion new models for a new weapon.

No amount of balancing fixes the fact that the meta for this game is still mostly undeveloped. When there are such disparities in team comps at the highest levels of play, that’s not a balance issue. If it were a balance issue, everyone would be running the same teams. Instead, the disparity in team comps is an issue of the players not understanding the meta and what the optimal team comp is.

I’m not saying I have the answer, but it’s more on us as players to figure out the game than it is for anet to just nerf whoever built the better team.

It has to be this way. The point of going defensive or CC with specs is an attempt to outlast or disable your opponent. You can’t outlast something that has a thousand times your HP, and you can’t disable the bosses pretty much at all, so what left is there but to spec for as much damage as possible?

That’s not even mentioning that speccing full defense is a less effective defensive measure than hitting your dodge button in PvE.

Unless they make the boss fights more similar to PvP fights (groups of opponents that are in the vicinity of the player in terms of strength and are actually bound to the gameplay mechanics), it’s always going to be this way.

dace.8019:

How about we not re-use disposable temporary content?

So you’re opposed to Wintersday and the Mad King as well, hm?

I’m watching some RPers do their thing in the Grove now. I’m not much of an RPer myself anymore, but seeing it in the world is good for immersion. So I hope those of you that are RPing don’t let the megaserver thing or the occasional dummy discourage you.

In terms of design, it’s an oversight. They either figure it’ll calm down as people gradually get the trait done, or they’re already planning to change it.

Just remember though, it’s not the players’ fault for wanting to succeed the defend event. I know you already said you weren’t complaining about those players, but a ton of people are.

I kinda suspect that a certain “special guest” is going to crash the party, tbh.

Best in no order:

• Jumping puzzles/Super Adventure Box
• Visual/world/character design
• WvW/PvP
• Combat fluidity/animations
• Music

Worst in no order:

• Underwater combat (love the underwater visuals, wish it was just exploration and puzzling instead)
• Stealth dropping UI target (just because the guy stealthed doesn’t mean I forgot that I wanted to attack him)
• Ascended gear (it’s a lot of hassle for something that feels so necessary)
• Trait point distribution (would rather see all 14 trait points available by level 60)
• Elite skills (for the most part, too gimmicky and cooldowns are too high)

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

Here is one copy of the interview with Mike O’Brien

Ah. I was hoping to see more along the lines of if they kept the exp amounts the same between levels, had the same availability of drops and coin payouts for dungeons/pvp/activities/etc, if crafting took the same amounts of materials or introduced a failure chance, stuff like that.

I’d be surprised if none of those things has changed.

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

Keep in mind that the game got some interesting overhauls for China, things we don’t have (some of which I hope we never do). It’s not quite the same animal…

Do you have a link or something for this? I mean, I don’t doubt it at all; I’d just be interested to see what’s been done.

Didn’t realize this was a necro until I logged in to reply and I already had a post in the thread!

Eve.1580:

And after each match we should give the losing team a hug to make them feel better. Trophies for everyone yay!

So it’s okay to treat someone like garbage because you beat them at a videogame? It already doesn’t feel good to lose. People don’t need to be subject to abuse over it.

Seras.5702:

And it looks like you’ve got boobs.

Hah! It does!

This is why we can’t have nice things. Right here, this.

We have to be left in the dark about the future of the game, because whenever they say ANYTHING about what they want to do, people **** negativity all over the forums about “promises”.