That wasn’t the question. OP asked for opinions and that is mine. I represent no one but myself. If others care, I assume they will post and I have no intention of arguing with them.
Since the question is specifically about opinions, here’s mine. I don’t really care. Legendaries (of which I have crafted one) comprise an amusing side game that means little to me. I tend to focus on ascended gear instead. In fairness, part of this is the fact that the appearance, in general, of legendary weapons in GW2 doesn’t much appeal to me.
When HoT was released, the mention of legendary weapons didn’t get much of a rise out of me to begin with. Not sure how prevalent among the broad player base my view is.
As for the next expansion in general, I am far more interested in the new maps.
This is not meant to minimize or disagree with the OP point of view. This is just my personal take on it.
I love guild missions as they are. They are one of the most inclusive things in the game. Players of different skill levels and intensity come together for just over an hour once a week. We socialize. We do some missions that, in all honesty, don’t push the envelope. All of the participants, casual and hardcore, get a few coin, some rares, guild commendations, and lots of laughs. Can’t do the jumping sometimes? No problem. Someone has a mesmer. Don’t know the fights or the combat system well. No problem. Get a tag. If you die, someone will rez you or…you simply get to watch the rest of the fight and still get your rewards. If things go badly, no problem. We can re-do it or try next week. It’s one of the few times we get everyone on TS.
I don’t have a problem if they want to make some more intense HoT missions but, at least for me, having the ones we have in Tyria make the guild a great place to be.
I liked it. +1 I’ve played other games and frequented their websites. Developers on other games have often posted these kinds of notes. Not all like them but I do enjoy it. It’s like reading a good piece of satire that has you wondering in the first few sentences if this can possibly be true. Part of the fun is the discovery of the absurdness.
So, my compliments to the OP for taking the time to post it. Nicely done.
Ditto for me. I guess I’ll check back later.
The posts that cite Anet’s decision to make armor sets in-game rewards and outfits gem store items are spot on. If memory serves, there were a fair number of tirades in the forums from players who wanted this change (armors in-game, outfits gem store) and I seem to recall Anet making a formal announcement that this would be their strategy going forward.
So, while some may agree or disagree with this direction, it does seem that player input, at the very least, helped to shape this strategy.
Yes. I think you have that right. If you do not buy, you can still play on old maps; old content but new stuff requires expac.
Will there be no pause in HoT personal story?
in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns
Posted by: Elothar.4382
Maybe I am missing something or perhaps this is just semantics…but I was given to understand that the personal story ends with Victory or Death (Zhaitan fight). Everything after that is the Living Story and is for level 80. Living story is not gated by personal story completion and, once you are level 80, I would assume the only gating for living story is completion of specific parts.
As I said, maybe I am wrong here…but this is how I have been viewing it.
Iam soo angry right now, in fact everyone is. Are you out of your mind Anet ? You just added the holy Trinity aspect that you so highly wanted to perform a new next generation plaform, but with you new Elite specialisation …you just broke the record… you did it, not only extrem NONSTOPP spamming heal and following COMBO fields attached to druid and freaking Stealth aspect and swapping stun…. IAM FREAKING SPEECHLESS!
Time for you all to rage !
Well…no…I am not “sooo angry.” I am actually pretty happy about it. To me…my own opinion…it sounds interesting and I am looking forward to it. Others will disagree with me…but opinions are just that.
I am very much a casual…both in terms of the amount of time that I spend in game and the intensity with which I play. My view of the game is very different from OP. I feel very rewarded. Most of my characters have ascended weapons. Two have a couple of pieces of ascended armor. Most have the ascended amulets and rings from laurels. I don’t really feel this is a grind, at least from my perspective. I set goals depending on my interests at any given time and then work those goals into my preferred game play. It’s not perfect. I do from time to time have to do something that I might not ordinarily do. Overall, though, I tend to play the way I want and feel that my rewards are appropriate (given the generally low level of rewards in this game).
By contrast, though, I have left other games because of what I perceived was an endless grind with extremely poor returns on the investment. I guess it kind of depends on your preferences and view of the game.
I don’t do chest farming. On the rare occasion when I zone into a chest farm map, I use the LFG tool to move into an event map. I get the OP point…just doesn’t seem that big of a deal to me.
Also, unless you parked at the very beginning of a starting zone and didn’t move, you would get xp from discovery, which would contribute to leveling, depending on how far you wandered.
I agree with most of the posts here. Raids…or challenging group content (as it was referred to) has always been part of the advertised expansion content. If anything, this goes to answer those concerns about the amount of content in this paid expansion. For those that choose not to buy HoT, they will still have the same content that they paid for at launch…nothing about that content is diminished. Raids are new to this expansion and it only makes sense to lock them behind that wall.
I am optimistic about the enrage timer. I have done lots of raid bosses with enrage timers in other games and my experience is that, while they are a DPS check, it is not solely that. As others have so aptly pointed out, you cannot do max DPS if you are dead. My experience has been that, whatever the game or boss, you have to have the bulk of your party up and working in order to beat enrage timers. I doubt…or at least I hope…that Anet will not design an encounter with an enrage timer that can be beaten simply by having ten players in berserker gear piling on in a DPS race. I may well be wrong on this…but I am really hopeful having read the article.
…and welcome to the game!
I have been faithfully reading the HoT forums but mostly content to just digest and consider the views of others. About the orders, though…
I have run, I think, about ten of my characters through PS far enough to join an order. I have to say that the selection and joining of the order has always been a high point for me and even after all of these characters, I still enjoy each time around. It seems a shame that such a strong line of content has not been fully developed or is ongoing. I would very much like to see the inclusion of orders as we go forward.
That said, I can see the difficulty for those that didn’t do the PS far enough to select. Maybe there could be some alternate form of order recruitment in the expansion or maybe LS3 when it comes along.
Also…the deluxe and ultimate versions come with an HoT glider skin.
I am averse to gambling. I am also one of those players that doesn’t tend to have much gold. I have had to change my entire outlook on dyes…rather than plopping down gems for the chance at a particular dye or set of dyes, I have forced myself to convert an amount of gems to gold and then simply buy what I want off the TP. As others have said, this really does work nicely and lets you get what you want.
If you are not so averse to gambling, I guess there is always the chance that buying one dye pack will get you that super rare, expensive dye you are looking for but I am not willing to bet on it.
Reading this thread prompted me to give this a shot. I have four household accounts here and I was very pleasantly surprised at how smooth the process was. Nice job, Anet.
I have names that I got when the game released that are great names…exactly what I wanted. The new characters I create…not so much. I have to struggle to find names that “work” for me so I understand the frustration. All that said, I still prefer to have no recycling of names. I would rather have to struggle and work for new ones than to have a system where you are at risk of losing names because of inactivity.
It would help if you let us know what level 80 areas you are looking at. The ones that I know of…Southsun Cove, is accessed through a portal in Lion’s Arch. I think it is now located with the other portals. Dry top and Silverwastes are accessed through Brisban Wildlands. Frostgorge Sound is not strictly level 80…but goes up to 80 – accessed through northern Wayfarer Foothills or through Northwest Fireheart Rise. Then there are the Orr zones…I am thinking that Cursed Shore is the only one that is strictly level 80. Those are all accessed sequentially starting down in either Mount Maelstrom or Sparkfly Fen. Not sure if this helps or not.
As to the other question about key binds…I have not found a way to have different keybinds on different characters. They seem account bound…but others might have better insight into that.
Same here. I had to re-enter but worked okay.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Inconceivable!
I am sure that I am probably in the minority, but it is not the raw cost of a subscription that bothers me. I am not terribly price sensitive. The reason that I do not favor subscription is that you are simply paying a monthly fee for the privilege of accessing the game. If you pay your subscription and end up taking some time off…say a week or two…it seems like throwing money down a toilet.
The way that I use the gem store, I get things that have lasting value to me…perpetual gathering tools, extra bank or bag slots, etc. Once I have purchased them, I have them indefinitely into the future. In a subscription system, once the month is over, there is no residual value. If I want to keep playing, I have to keep paying. Even paying for the base game or the expansion…I have that access into the future without further payments.
For me, that means that I feel no particular pressure to log in. If I want to play, I log in and do what I want and, when done, I log off. When I played a subscription game (and I played one for eight years), there was always a nagging pressure to log in and do whatever grind they had set up for me. I doubt seriously that I am spending any less money now…but I do pay for things I want and can use rather than just paying for the right to access the basic game.
Caveat – I am not down there every day. I only do Teq once in a while. That said…
I have never seen defenses ignored. In fact, the lead-up discussions in chat seem to focus more on the various defense positions than on the zerg. I am not sure what the fight would look like without the defenses since I have never tried it. Would be interested in others’ experiences…if they have done the fight without worrying about defenses.
Charr and Norn areas neck and neck for the top spot. Queensdale a distant third. Not much on Caledon and Metrica.
Rage from an MMO player base is not something that can be avoided. The MMO consumer base is like the mythical hydra — cut off one complaint and two more will take its place. Thus, designing to avoid complaints is not a viable approach to development.
Challenge in the persistent world is not designed into a solo-player v. solo normal mob scenario. Why? Because there are way too many possibilities for that solo player to face 2, 3, 4 or more mobs at the same time. My personal record for aggro, I think, in PvE roaming was ~6 normal Risen and 2 vets. Mobs are not like movie ninja. They’re designed to do the same damage whether they are on their own or in a group of 6-8.
Also, there are weak mobs and stronger mobs. Working as intended, maybe.
I’m waiting to see whether the AI changes that were talked about as part of HoT have: increased challenge; and increased challenge with staying power. That latter phrase is the real tester. Revised Risen and Krait were a lot more challenging than the mobs they replaced, but now they’re the status quo and everyone is used to them.
This speaks well to my views on it. I admit that 1 on 1 is never a problem…hardly requires effort at all. But rarely do I find myself 1 on 1. Taking on two, three, or four is more the norm. The beauty of the current system is that if I want more challenge in an area, it is relatively easy to gather mobs into groups of whatever size I want. They re-spawn fast enough that, if I am roaming, say…down in Orr…I am never at a loss for groups of mobs.
Having more challenging mobs would be great for those solo 1 on 1 fights but if there were substantive increases in mob difficulty, I can see roaming in areas with groups being more frustrating…at least for players with my skill level. I do recognize, though, that players with far greater skill than I have would likely enjoy the challenge of trash groups of greater difficulty…so…I guess finding the balance is the challenge for Anet.
I soloed also about a week ago, I think. Not much different than what has been posted above, although I really enjoyed it. I did allow a bit of time to do it so it didn’t really feel dragged out at all for me. When I ran the old story mode Arah with groups, most times it was with PUGs that didn’t communicate or socialize…kind of like running with four additional NPCs. Running solo was kind fun since I only had myself to worry about, if that makes sense.
I agree with Misguided…downsides simply a trade off to allow people to solo. On balance…I like the changes.
I put in four different dungeon token long bows.
Spent some dungeon tokens on four longbows…with the intent of salvaging or selling the product of the MS…out pops Leaf of Kudzu…one-time shot. Have not tried again since then.
I pre-purchased the Ultimate version and I’m still happy and can’t wait to play HoT.
This. If anything, I am more excited than I was before.
My personal take on the PS…I enjoyed it. I played through with five characters under the “old system” and just finished with one character last night, seeing new ending. It is not the most challenging content in the game but neither is it the easiest. Seemed about right to me.
I have completed PS on five of my characters. I have always soloed PS except the final piece…Arah…and of course used a group for that. Last night, I soloed the revised final episode on a Guardian.
I liked it. First, I disagree with OP on the risk, at least for me (I am not the best of players, obviously). I went down once and there were a number of times, especially when fighting the two dragons at once, where my blood was pumping. It definitely helped having been through Arah story mode…so I basically knew the fights. As for the rewards…I came away with an exotic account bound helm (berserker stats, if I recall correctly)…and that seemed very worthwhile for me…considering the smaller goodies I received.
I also think that the revised final episode is very much aligned in terms of difficulty with other episodes of the PS. As I said, I have routinely soloed everything leading up to Arah and the new version seems pretty consistent with my experiences.
Now, the caveat…I have never looked at the PS as needing to be super challenging content. It has always been something that I needed to work at…pay attention to mechanics and use all of my skills. I have just never viewed it as high end challenge…and for me, that is not a bad thing. I can understand, though, how better, more skilled players might find it overly simple.
As for DE…I am kind of torn on that one. If they were too powerful or too involved, it would “let me off the hook” somewhat. As it is, I know that I cannot depend on them and so I treat it like a solo experience. On the other hand…I can see where having them stand around doing nothing or just dying straight away tends to be annoying.
All in all…I am very happy with the changes.
Where does this come from that new players get more stuff than already existing players when pre-ordering? (Ive seen it a few times but cant remember reading it from an official anet post)
The only thing I can think of is that the expansion has the core game bundled with it. Since veteran players don’t really need that, it is really intended as a gift for those who are just coming to the game. But…everyone gets the bundle…not just new players. If there is anything else, I am not aware of it.
New content types don’t unlock when you hit 80. But you have dungeons, fractals, guild missions, achievements, collections. Even PvP and WvW can be started when you’re not 80.
This game is about choosing your own end game, instead of being thrown into a premade end game with a single path to advancement.
For example, if you want ascended gear, the only reliable way to get it is to craft. Some people try for a legendary. Some people try to unlock rare skins. Some people try to find and do every jumping puzzles.
Then there’s the Living Story which will continue when the expansion comes out.
There’s lots of stuff to do…but there’s nothing you have to do.
This pretty much sums it up for me. What Vayne has described here is exactly the reason that I migrated to GW2 after seven years with brand X. I don’t feel rushed to get anything done. I play what I want to play when I want to play it. And there are boatloads of things that I want to do that I just haven’t gotten around to yet.
Orr the best! Aside from that, toss up between Ascalon and Shiverpeaks. At the very bottom of the list…Maguuma. Kryta I like parts (Harathi Hinterlands) but not big on Queensdale.
In line with what others have said…it has never really mattered to me that I was getting xp for reviving others. It just seems like “the thing to do.”
So sorry for your loss and thank you so much for sharing this.
Thanks. I appreciate the information.
I searched through the threads here and could not find an answer to this question so here goes.
I am working on a cinematic video of Arah story mode and would like to use a piece of in-game music. First, is this allowed? Second, since I like to credit soundtrack artists and I assume that Jeremy Soule was the composer of this piece, do I credit Jeremy or Arenanet?
I have to agree with OP to some extent. While the zones are not difficult in terms of individual mobs and even small events, I have noticed that some of the Temple waypoints (and associated Karma vendors) are becoming more and more inaccessible simply because there are not sufficient numbers of players in the area. This is entirely anecdotal on my part…Arenanet probably has good data that shows any shifts in event completion and temple availability.
I don’t necessarily think that the difficulty needs any adjustment…but looking at the scaling and the number of people required for major events wouldn’t be a bad idea, I think.
I pray to the spirits of the wild…but they rarely answer.
Many thanks for the info and the upcoming changes. The opportunity to solo the final piece really has me excited. I have done it a bunch of times in groups…so the chance to go it alone is exciting to me. Fortunately, I have a bunch of alts at various stages of the story so I am good to go.
Seems to come in bunches…which makes sense. This kind of conversation kind of feeds on itself. Once it gets started with a bunch of kids, it seems to go on endlessly. So…I make generous use of my block function and move on.
Played a ranger. Other than having access to only a single pet, I did not notice anything major in the way of changes. I did not fool around with the traits…I used what they gave me and customized my utilities. Seemed to play okay.
Hmmm…interesting. Have not seen anything like that before. You can, though, do a quick check if you are interested. Go the Chantry of Secrets (Whispers HQ) (Bloodtide Coast) and see if it will let you into the inner area where they sell the armor. If you are not Whispers, it will not let you in. Worth a check anyway. Good luck.
The PS from lvl 30 to 40 you do some missions from all 3 Orders, but the last one actually decide which one you’ll be, so before that you can pick to help the Order of Whispers (“Shadow”) but in the end you accepted the Vigil mission along with your fiance.
This. As Bel said, you progress in your PS and you will have the opportunity to select missions for the different orders. At some point, though, you will be specifically prompted to join an order and it will be very clear that you are joining…not just doing a mission for one. As far as I know, once you pass that point…and actually join, there is no changing it.
Downloaded without a hitch. Everything working great here (North America).
We all learned from this thread , that the worst part of GW2 community is the WvW community.
I actually think it’s the other way around, but that’s just me.
Quite frankly, the biggest problem are people who stubbornly (and vociferously) only play one game mode. Or even worse, the people who only play one game mode, but refuse to ever touch large portions of it.
People play what they enjoy. This is not a job, a career, or a calling. It is entertainment for which we pay. It only makes sense that we would play the parts that we enjoy and avoid the parts we don’t. Not sure why this is such a problem. And….yes…I have tried all the different modes.