Guild Wars 2

This has been mentioned a lot elsewhere, but I’ll add my own two bits.

I also find that with Sword/pistol — it seems to be a popular setup among thieves, but I find it much too slow “feeling”.

I personally have levelled up with dagger/dagger + pistol/dagger (or short bow for groups). Then for utility abilities I’m making use of a lot of my stealth abilities — everything, even the heals. Put the bleeds on with death blossom, stealth, and hammer them with backstab. Most enemies won’t even have time to understand where you are

Pistol/dagger adds great kiting ability for pretty well anything that you can’t take head on, and then short bow adds a versatile option for groups — poison, aoe, the whole thing.

Sparrowhawk.5608:

Hecate.9403:

snip

Of course they played the game; are you trolling, or do you seriously believe that the developers of a game can go for many, many months and years without playing it?

Here’s an interesting thought; this game uses a rather interesting, new and unique dynamic (in my experience, at least): the lack of the Holy Trinity. You know what’s interesting about new things? Almost nobody is good at them first off, unless you’re a whiz (beta aside). Try actually sticking with it. Try actually saying ‘well that sucked’ and working out what went wrong, and then do something new. Try and come to terms with the fact that new things are HARD, and not everything in the world can be understood in a single try of its more difficult components (dungeons, in this case). Try realising that actual skill is the product of practice. Lots and lots of practice. Natural talent is something that people have to work really hard for (yes, that is a joke, and I hope you get the point).

If you are lucky and have a team you can chat to over vent, work out builds and combos to use. Work out means of mitigating the damage that kills you. Make sure target priority is understood, and so on and so forth. Don’t go in and expect things to get mowed down. And then, in case things don’t work out, DON’T go and complain that it’s too hard and abandon it. If, in two months or three months or however long, you still can’t beat whatever is stonewalling you? Then say it’s too hard. At that point you might be justified.

Great summary, this is pretty well it. It’s a bit depressing that people are already yelling for nerfs in the first couple of weeks. Seriously, this is a whole new paradigm of group dynamics… give it time. If anything, I’m a bit worried that we cleared story mode on my second time through without any major wiping. I’d hoped even that would be a bit more work.

Does the game claim to be for casuals? Where does it say that on the box, I must have missed that!

Again, as I said above, I’ve had different experiences, but have cleared it with pugs. Sometimes with wipes (if people were running around and not working as a team) and sometimes with not many at all.

Edit: also I might add that I found it awesomely fun. More of this please, Anet!

I’ve seen a general attitude in the dungeons so far that things are hard and lot’s of QQ about not being able to just storm through them on the first try and get all of the loot. On the other hand, I’ve also seen very little team-work so far (largely due to people not understanding this new way of working together, proper use of combo fields, etc). People aren’t running group builds part of the time, and just have maxed out damage for their general PvE leveling.

On the other hand, I have been with groups who had a very good grasp of this new style of group dynamic, and they blew through the place with little or no problems — the experience was radically different. It was orderly, there were very few deaths, and I got a real rush of excitement knowing how differently it could be done.

I think people need to take a step back and understand that these dungeons are going to be here a while, and having difficult content is a GREAT thing for the game overall. These are not meant to be zerged, these are instances in which we can test our knowledge of our class and our ability to work in synergy with our team-mates. Just give it some time… and not judge the design in the first few weeks after release.

Also a great post from a hardcore raider’s perspective here:
http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/thread/360077/page/1

As posted above, some have missed it - the solution to the depositing the mini pet thing is to put them into "invisible bags" - look them up, it works fine.

I agree – I’ve been doing leatherworking, huntsman, cooking and jeweller on 2 different characters and I’ve found them all useful, engaging and fun.

I love the complexity of cooking especially, and the whole getting exp from going down a crafting route is great.

Perhaps my only complaint is that you can’t craft directly from the mats in your collections area – as it feels a little clunky that you have to do these big drag back and forth sessions (for cooking especially) when you’re trying to discover things with different combinations of all of your materials.

All in all, great job though, Anet. That goes also for the game as a whole.