It works best in PvE. The small percentage (probably more like 10%) at least keeps getting rerolled if you kill a big mob of ten or so. Not that you really die that much in PvE anyway.
I rarely get to use it. When I do, it’s only when I know I’ll die anyway. I’m certainly not going to burn 20 points in our worst attribute line just for the trait to make it work correctly.
You don’t need the worthless warhorn trait. Just use Signet of Rage, in general. It barely has a downtime. If you use it as soon as it’s up, even without using anything else, you’ll have swiftness up all the time, barring little 9 or so second windows. Considering how borderline worthless the Warbanner is and the complete worthlessness of Rampage, SoR should always be on your bar to begin with.
I used to run nothing but Sword/Warhorn until I discovered this. Then I went to Greatsword, which has two closers that also help cover distance quickly. Other than the swords, you’re out of luck.
They’re not nordic. They’re a fantasy race. Just because they’re loosely based on something doesn’t mean they should replicate their every tiniest detail.
Not only continuity, but actually having the characters matter in the context of the narrative. Just plopping a NPC next to us for one or two “[F] Talk” prompts with unvoiced dialogue is NOT the solution. Where did so-and-so go should not just degenerate into an easy to place text prompt here and there to buff out continuity problems. I mention this because I know how you do. I know how you do, ANet.
You really need to respect your universe and writing. You certainly don’t right now. It’s obvious no one loves this universe as their own creation in your offices. Or if they do, your process isn’t conductive to creating a strong narrative with endearing, memorable characters with a central theme. Things like the dialogue “A and B” cutscenes (which many warned you about and expressed disappointment in well before even the betas) to the partitioned storyline, everything was set up as part of a formula to deliver features of a video game rather than to deliver a story. That’s what I sense when I play through GW2. It’s an engineered experience, not a provocative one.
I just don’t like underwater combat. As a Warrior, I either get a weapon I can’t use most of the time (melee), or the weakest weapon imaginable.
What makes it unforgiveable is how much health everything has. It’d be fine if I could mow through things. I’d want to go into the water. It’d be refreshing, after all the undead. But nope. Harder in many ways. Plus you don’t get access to some skills, and if your build hinged somewhat on your weapon, you lose that too. It’s just too irritating. Like many things in this game, it’s a lot of work for no payout whatsoever – more likely cheated into a death or two to drain your money off.
DR / anti-farm codes are hopefully placeholders and they will make a better system soon.
Unlikely. Guild Wars 1 used the exact same system. We hated it for years.
ANet’s general policy on everything is that they care more about managing the economy than they do about player’s everyday enjoyment of the game. If they feel they can inconvenience the entire player population just enough that it’s only a minor problem, and it makes their workdays a little easier, they will do it.
I’ve never been impressed with Aimed Shot, myself. It’s easily outclassed by its own #3, and it’s not as though it actively does any utility, whatsoever. It basically is just the #3 skill in one shot, with a huge, obvious windup animation and the tendency to miss badly.
But yeah, you go Discipline mainly if you’re doing some sort of odd condition spec. The buff to burst damage isn’t worth the bother, even if you’re investing 30 into the line and traiting for F1 cooldown. Unfortunately some of the Warrior’s only decent traits are in there, although even then, it’s usually more of a detriment to your build to invest points there than it is a benefit.
The secondary benefit should probably be something more along the lines of either adrenaline gain, skill cooldown reduction or granting some natural regen in combat… or something. Honestly, the Warrior has way too much of min-maxing numbers with traits to begin with.
(edited by Plague.5329)
Okay, rather ordinary build, although you don’t really do anything spectacular. Playing Warrior in PvP, you’re generally going to either be spamming bow AoEs, trying to pick off escapees with your rifle, or just killing off NPCs with GS.
The most impressive thing you’ll likely ever see a Warrior do in WvW is, in a coordinated team of other Warriors, use Endure + Stability to rush into a group prior to load-in, and GS burst the area to clear a path, using either Fear Me or what have you to break up the formation. Even then, it’s not like you’re doing anythinkittenressive. You just use Endure Pain and run in blind, swinging at air and hoping someone is in front of you.
I don’t remember ever hearing anyone complain about Warriors not being able to do enough damage either way. Their problem is that they can’t really get into the thick of things in WvW to DO that damage, most of the time. They can’t stealth out or use clones or what have you to get away. It’s just Endure Pain, run in, try to do about 4 seconds of damage, turn around, try to walk out of it. Unless you’re fighting a bad server. Then you can do pretty much whatever.
It’d be nice if any skin you’ve ever used, you can get as a transmutable item, like the HoM skins. No more “make a new character, transmute twice, move across banks, etc etc” nonsense.
Considering how many of these I get, I will soon be rich! Rich I tell you!
IMO while they can be “useful” in the sense that stacking stat bonuses together results in min-maxed builds, they are certainly not interesting. Traits were advertised as skills your character knows that alter the way they play the game, and use ordinary skills. Attaching +5% damage does not do this at all, and is pretty pathetic for a trait idea. Unfortunately, this is a sizable majority of what Warrior traits are. It’s the min-max profession. No fun allowed while in the trait menu.
One other thing to consider is that fighting five mobs at once can be easier than having to wear down five Risen in a row. You may eventually just run out of steam if they can outdamage you over a long period of time. Since you can’t group them all up (they haven’t spawned yet), you can’t outplay them. This can make a single respawning enemy very annoying since one slap can make it impossible for you to regenerate your health in between fights.
Guild Wars 1 player. Never played any other MMO, so things like “minimalist interface” or “no gear grind” don’t really mean much to me, since GW1 didn’t have them (and actually tended to be better at it than GW2 is).
So best? WvW, probably, in spite of its many flaws.
Worst? The inability to create truly distinct builds due to having my atts locked, with only three real secondary slots, with almost no skills to choose from. You can make tiny little variations on the same small group of builds, but after 300 hours of gameplay on one profession you’ve more than seen it all for your own builds and are just sick of it.
Would I pay for it again? Yeah. If that’s what you’re asking.
A lot of the problems I anticipated that the game would have ended up being worse than I thought they would be. Some of the core problems I had with the game in general over GW1 ended up being true. Limited skill selection, boring gameplay over time, inability to change builds, lack of reason to change weapons other than just because, and so on.
I don’t think I’ll play it like I did GW1. I played that for years without ever feeling bored, because the core mechanics of its combat system were so vast. GW2 is nothing like that, and I felt bored with it well before I hit level 80. That will probably never change, so I anticipate moving on rather quickly.
The goals I had in GW1 were making various 15k armor sets for various kinds of builds I ran, in addition to collecting all the skills in the game.
Of course, in GW2, there aren’t many skills, and the way builds work, you don’t really need another armor set since you can’t change your attributes without paying money for it anyway (so no one does it). In GW1 I’d change my whole build a few times a day. In GW2 I’ve only changed it a few times, usually just small alterations. I planned my traits in the betas to ensure I didn’t mess them up and need a reroll. I think the fact that combat is so one dimensional hurts the game a lot, and impacts a lot throughout it.
In GW1 I’d have a set on my necro for minion mastery (that looked like a MM armor too. black tormenter. mmm…), a set for general condition use, a set for spiking, etc. In GW2 I have a normal damage set and a magic find set. That’s it. I guess I could have a new set for rune type, but since I can’t switch attributes all the time, there’s no real point.
The problem with your analysis is that it assumes a customer not liking your product makes you or your product a failure, when it could be just as simple as a bad fit (not every product is for everybody).
ANet has never said get on board or get out, but by the same token just because they didn’t get every single human on the planet to like their game doesn’t mean the capitulate to their desires. It just means that you except that the customer didn’t purchase the right product for themselves, either from lack of knowledge or because of a smooth talking salesman (buyer beware).
Customer expectation is a problem the designer can’t fix and is not their problem. Unfortunately we live in a society where the consumer has been given to much power in the seller/purchaser relationship. Granted this is in reaction to when the seller had to much power, but imbalance the other way never makes up for the original imbalance.
That’s fair, although you have to consider your market if you’re trying to sell to it. In that situation, if it was just marketed to the wrong people, that again is the producer’s fault, not the consumer.
However, with GW2, obviously they have a very, very large market. Their main concern is going to be who their primary income is. Will it be new players trickling in, enjoying the game until 80, then quitting, and possibly returning for expansions? Gem purchasers? How long will those people play? How much of a stretch in income do we want to ensure repeat purchases but also not to trivialize limited content? Those are questions we won’t have answers to because we don’t know what their income looks like. What they focus on will depend on who they’re trying to retain the most. You can’t please everyone, but you can please your best customers.
Best thing I can think of is to give certain NPCs in the storylines which follow you (such as Logan), 10x health (or more depending on their important in lore, such as the members of Destiny’s Edge who by rights are the premier heroes of the game) and the ability to self-resurrect after say, 10 seconds. You could always reduce their damage so they can’t kill boss characters on their own, just the odd minion or two.
They sure do eat dirt a lot. In the final missions it really settled in that they were completely worthless. They do no damage and tend to die very quickly. In the final, final mission, phew… man, that airship was strewn with DE corpses at all times. I’d revive one and they’d literally die before I could even finish standing up.
Maybe they’re just old.
(concluded)
For another, which is my primary concern because I doubt ANet will ever change it, is there needs to be more skills available for your weapons (at least two per slot), and there need to be a lot more secondary skills, better elites (the current ones are too “safe” in design to avoid potential balancing problems ANet doesn’t want to deal with and do not behave as elite skills in most cases, and often do not synergize with your build…), and most importantly, counters for basic problems in combat like CCs need to be handled to various degrees by more than a single skill to ensure that one skill is not welded to your skillbar. In GW1, sure, you had to have a hard counter, but across all professions, your choices for that counter were numerous and all had different synergies. Not so in GW2 at all. Paying for rerolls also needs to go. It was not tolerated in GW1 and it should not be tolerated here. Find a gold sink elsewhere. People do not use the feature often, if at all, because of the expense, resulting in static, boring gameplay that feels stale well before you hit 80, much less before. These things worry me because, having dealt with ANet for years, they are a very “safe” company that is responsive to basic needs (especially if they’ve already been working on them the whole time before players even noticed the issue) but when faced with a major design flaw, will drag their feet for years. (Charm Animal, anyone?) I’m not sure if these very basic flaws in the design of the game will ever be fixed, but they have a very big impact on the player’s ability to renew content as they play. They need to be changed for the health of the game, overall.
Again, the problem is never the consumer, when it comes to design. Your job is to make something that makes money, and keeps making money. If your consumers decide to take their money somewhere else, you don’t stab your finger at their back as they walk into the sunset and tell them they don’t know how to enjoy your product. That’s your failure. You are the failure. Not them. You are the bad designer. If you can’t respond to that failure, all the worse for you. The consumer will just move on, leaving you only with a collection of fanboys eager to stroke your ego and agree with one another that everything is perfect, except for all the problems they can’t bring themselves to address.
PS I write as a hobby, forgive me.
(edited by Plague.5329)
Now consider GW2’s combat system. Weapons have five skills for your profession. No more, ever. You get a healing slot, and an elite slot that you may rarely use, depending on the quality of your elite (and most are rather unimpressive). That leaves three slots for an actual build of your own design. For these slots, there is a tiny handful of skills to choose from, some of them doing the same thing but on different cooldowns or with a passive effect, etc. Also, coupled with some of the innate problems with combat in general (heavy need to counter CC, inability to supplement some key behaviors or secondary skills with primary weapon skills, and so on), you end up having to use the same skills, all the time. There’s not much renewing content going on, on your skillbar. There’s some, but very, very little, especially compared to a game like GW1. This is a massive step down. Also, unlike GW1, you cannot alter your attributes at any time in town, for free. It costs money, which is hard to come by due to the grind required to change your non-unique look. So, you end up stuck in the same skill trees for the entire lifespan of your character, VASTLY limiting your replayability. Also consider that many traits do not greatly alter how the game is played or how skills behave, to begin with. Some do, but these are not common, especially in some professions that are plagued with boring traits that do nothing but raise an invisible number. Some weapons also will naturally behave better in general gameplay than others, meaning there’s no reason to use one kind or combination. You can think of your own examples. You may want to use another weapon type, but it’s ineffective against hoards of enemies, or it’s another melee weapon and you already have a set for that and need a ranged set, or so on – many reasons. Even preferring the aesthetic of being a greatsword mesmer over being a sword mesmer, or preferring being a rifle warrior over using a bow, just because you like the appeal of it, limits you because you can’t change that weapon’s skills. You can’t play the game your way. All of these problems compound to make general combat in GW2 incredibly redundant. Content is stretched too thin for what little there is, and much of it is either locked out most of the time or impossible to use without neutering yourself. This is especially a problem in sPvP, where already certain build types have proven the most effective, and cookie cutters have emerged faster than they do in other games. The very problems GW2 wanted to avoid, it has created in spades, simply because ANet wished to avoid the balancing issues it had in GW1 by reducing the combat in GW2 to a handful of preapproved build types. This alone destroys renewing content, as it affects everything in the entire game.
To sum things up, GW2’s problem isn’t that players are stupid. (Don’t be stupid yourself, saying something like that.) The problem is that the game, right now, does not have much depth. There’s no reason to return to old experiences, experiences do not change, combat rarely changes, your build is fairly static, there are too many goldsinks at the endgame designed to try to keep your bank account as close to 0 as possible, there’s very little skill variety, very little aesthetic variety and for what is there, it will take a very long time to achieve which stretches everything too thin. That’s the problem. Not carrots, but the natural desire to keep playing – needing variation on experiences to make the experience fun.
As I see it, some things need to change.
For one, more content is needed. This will come naturally. Specifically, we need art. A lot of it. We need a LOT more endgame armor sets and weapons. Furthermore, people who craft them need a LOT more sets to craft at 400 skill. Not one. Not all the cruddy ones you see everyone wearing because they’re what you make as you level to 400. Just more max level sets. This should, again, all naturally happen over time. Similarly, with maps, the rewards for completing them should be even but distinct. Playing in Orr should be as profitable as playing in Queensdale (and indeed profitable, not just the same pocket change), just with different materials and skins involved. There should also be longer term reasons for returning to these zones, like earning another secondary currency unique to those areas of the world, similarly to dungeon tokens, with the rewards they link to overlapping with other currencies to flush out problems with grinding but allowing achievements in other sectors of the game to compound on one another for a global return. Even tiny things like making chests, champions and bosses of most kinds drops things that don’t insult the player’s experience by crapping all over it with commons and uncommons. These are simple changes; the only reason to avoid them is the looming fear of messing up the economy, which unfortunately seems to be the source of many problems in the game.
(cont)
(edited by Plague.5329)
Let’s go back to the things GW2 is trying to do. The downleveling system, for one. Sure, you can go back to these areas. But if you’ve already 100% them, why would you? Sure, you may have missed a DE, as ANet has told us, but you aren’t going to wander around the zone for hours and hours with this one goal in mind, especially when you aren’t even sure if it’s there. Unless play content really is always being updated (and it’s not), there is no designed incentive to return other than farming materials, possibly looking for (very common) low level skins you can probably find in the TP, or helping friends repeat an area of content you no longer have interest in.
Similarly, let’s take a look at the gear progression we have. In other games, sure, the only thing left to do is to get that weapon with the slightly higher number on it. In GW2, getting such a weapon is fairly easy (not as easy as in GW1, but still easy), so your objective ends up being looks. Right now, there aren’t very many looks in the game. Sure, if you tally up them all, across all weapons and skins, that’s a lot of work. But if you’re a human thief, or a norn warrior, or so on, your choices just became much more limited because you obviously can’t use them all. Also, coupled with this, most of the skins are things you see all the time, for the sake of diversity as you level up. True “endgame” skins that are not common to the world are incredibly rare, and when you consider the limitations of what you can actually wear, there aren’t very many of them at all that you can use. As a result, you see hundreds of people wearing Citadel armor, or Orrian karma armor, or so on. Everyone is trying to look unique, but there’s not much to choose from to MAKE them look unique. As such, you have a lot of people scrambling for legendaries, because there’s simply nothing else left for them, in terms of appearance. (And of course there will always be the “FIRST” people who just want to be big shots and have reddit talk about them for a couple days, but I consider them a small minority, although that sort of meta is also part of designing renewing content.) This is a problem with a lack of viable aesthetic content, which is mainly a release issue. Most games get around this with traditional grind for numbers. GW1 had a similar problem for quite a while, until the incredibly rapid rate of campaign releases resolved it (as there was no number treadmill and the only thing left to search for were rare drops). In GW2, coupled with this problem is the problem that most of the actually unique looks in the game have intense grinds associated with them. Tier 3 cultural armor. Orrian karma armor. Legendary weapons. All of these take an obscene amount of time to get (some more than others), yet they are the only truly unique look in a sea of chainmail armors, acolyte’s armor, and so on. So, naturally, people who don’t want to look like everyone else will naturally get irritated when they so far have 1) no new content to play and experience and 2) no other choices for aesthetics.
This compounds on itself, as the only way to circumvent these grinds is to replay the same areas in Orr, over and over again, because Orr offers the highest incomes and most frequent chances to increase income. You could go play in Queensdale or Sparkfly Fen, or wherever, but what you’ll make there is a drop in the bucket compared to Orr. You could play it for the experience, but remember, players have cleared these areas. They won’t go back for less money, more time wasted, just because there MIGHT be something new there.
Perhaps the biggest long term problem is combat in GW2. GW1 players will understand this a lot better than other MMO players, as most MMOs just offer millions of skills you never use on gigantic toolbars. ANet, during their marketing, stated that GW1 skills were not unique from one another, which was true in some cases, but was definitely exaggerated. Most abilities in GW1 were very distinct – perhaps not in animations or behavior, but very much so in effect. Being able to use them in conjunction with one another was THE single biggest factor in renewed content across the entire game, in my opinion. This alone kept me playing PvP for years, constantly trying new profession combinations and new build types. The combat was amazingly diverse and rich, and incredibly rewarding. The ability to change your attributes at will in any town, along with the ability to use any skill in the game, made GW1 a game you could never “finish.”
(cont)
Guild Wars 1, starting out in Prophecies, achieved replayability but didn’t do so by having nightmarishly long grinds. Getting to level 20 was just a tutorial for playing the game, wherein in taught you various mechanics until you knew everything that would come up in the game afterwards. Perfect gear was very easy to get. 1.5k sets were in Droknar’s Forge as soon as you hit level 20. A whole set would cost about 15k gold (probably about 1g 50s 0c in GW2 parlance). Very easy. The most beautiful sets cost around 15k per piece, but this was still easily affordable. The only exception could be Obsidian armor, at the time, which I think was the ONLY real grind in the game of any kind. Point being, people played GW1 for years without any grind at all. How? Two things: expansions and a robust combat system. Both of these things result in renewing content, and renewed experience. The new content is obvious, but the combat system was so rich, rewarding and expansive that you were constantly on the hunt for new skills to make a new kind of build. This alone kept people in the arenas for literally almost a decade.
So, what does GW2 have in terms of renewing content? Scaling, leveled zones you can go back to any time. Tiered rarities to stretch out the time you spend trying to get the weapon and armor you want. A focus on aesthetics to give players new things to desire. Traited combat to encourage new builds, and new ways to play. These sorts of things just keep going. You get the idea. There’s a lot in GW2 that is designed to try to encourage this sort of renewing content.
Now, the problem players are having with GW2 isn’t that they have carrots to chase. This is a gross oversimplification of what it, at its heart, the core issue with all game design. It’s a disservice to design to treat it so absent-mindedly. The issue GW2 has is that its renewing content is not being effective. Once players finish all the zones and beat the story, there’s not much left. Which I imagine makes no sense to the designers of the game, but it is what it is. Why? Well…
(cont)
It’s easy to just blame the players rather than the designers, especially if you’re a fan of the game, and most especially if you aren’t experienced with any of the content people are concerned over.
Firstly, the fault of response never lies with the viewer. It’s always the designer. If a designer wants the audience to have a response, crafting the things to create that response is what he DOES. That’s what design theory is. So right away, you cannot blame the player. It doesn’t matter if they’re “trained,” or whatever excuse you need to use. Untrain them. Reteach them. That’s your job, as a designer, if necessary.
Furthermore, I don’t think players are bad players that have been trained towards certain things. Sure, there are some MMO conventions that people seem to have a hard time to get around. But humans don’t go out and buy a game with the intent of doing spreadsheets and crunching numbers and grinding. They WANT to have fun. Everyone wants to have fun. All the tedium associated with MMOs is the result of bad design.
The way I see it, you can have extremes of games. Take a game like Myst, for example. No items, upgrades, you can say. It was just wandering around an environment, solving puzzles. People obviously loved that. You can’t say all games need “carrots” (as fanboys have seemed to enjoy calling everything lately). They don’t. What games do need is renewing progression.
After you beat many games, you stop playing them. Why? Because you beat the game. You may play through it again, but if it’s the same exact experience, there’s no reason to. You don’t want to; you’ve had that experience once. Fun in general is a human instinct to compel us to have new experiences and explore the world around us. When we feel an experience is no longer compelling, it stops being fun. So, how do games keep us playing? Numbers, upgrades, advancements of any kind. Also, changing the way you play the game, as you play it. Difficulty modes. Secrets. Doing the same content, but with an entirely new skillset that makes the experience new again.
(cont)
Play a Guardian. You can make a “tank” Warrior but it’s less effective than both the Guardian and some other classes. Warriors are just the generic median class of the game. They don’t do anything well but they’re not terrible at too much either.
The best you can do is run X/Shield with Endure Pain, 30/30 defense and vitality, traited for healing shouts. You can also try to switch out to warhorn for AoE weakness to minimize incoming damage as a quick swap.
Of course you can always just abuse consumable items, but any class can do that.
The rifle is next to worthless in PvE, if you’re actually trying to be efficient about it.
The bow is basically an AoE machine, although you need the right build for it. Basically, you need to focus on keeping your adrenaline up, all the time. Either by traiting for it or using signets, etc. Combustive is the only combo field a warrior can make. F1+#3. Get used to that.
Also, it’s a longbow only in the sense that it has range if you need it. The damage doesn’t drop if you get close. You’ll want to use it at somewhat close ranges. Wrangle up about five enemies, strafe in a circle, firing, in your own combustive shot, firing that #3 skill, then switch to a melee weapon to finish them all off at once. #5 can be cute for trapping a veteran or some other pest in your AoE.
It’s a very good weapon for tagging enemies and wearing down very large groups. Your rifle can’t do anything to save you in a situation where you’re fighting fifteen enemies at once. The bow will, and it’s your only other ranged option. The rifle is mainly just there for bosses, or for when you’re sick of the bow (and I get sick of it pretty often).
Warriors don’t really have much diversity since our weapons don’t do too many cute tricks. Just damage with a couple conditions. Hence why you see so many greatsword+bow Warriors in PvE. It’s just the most efficient setup.
[edit]: HOWEVER. …The bow is probably still the Warrior’s worst weapon. The main problem is the speed of the projectiles, although you can remedy that by going “melee” with it. It’d be interesting if some aspect of it changed based on your range. Like you get more power at long ranges but your projectiles speed up a lot more at short ranges.
(edited by Plague.5329)
WvW’s problem is also its appeal: you can grief people if you outnumber them, and there’s not much you can do about it. As the matches have gotten more even, I’ve discovered that not a lot actually gets done in the matches, and it just turns into either a back and forth invisible zerg army, retaking the two same supply camps, or camping out, farming random pub players that wander into the wrong area.
Oh, ANet. Where didst thou go wrong? In better days, you really, truly did know better than this.
Level 80. Exotic. Just one.
Guild Wars 2 is like working for the cheapest boss you have ever had. You put in a full year’s work and ask for a day off, and he can’t even bring himself to give you that. One level 80 exotic. Come on guys. Are you really this cheap? If the idea of handing out a single “unique” weapon, ala GW1, actually terrifies you this much, it says a lot about not only the current (busted) state of the game’s reward system, but also your company’s vision for the game’s future.
I don’t care about the weapon so much as I’m concerned that you can’t even do THIS. This small thing that was just a basic component to GW1. And if you can’t do this, I expect you’ll never fix anything else in regards to loot and overall income and rewards. You might even reduce them even more. That’s a real step backwards as a game, and a company. And probably just to save yourself some work.
I desired the t3 armor because it’s one of the few armors in the game that looks good on my character.
It’s a shame they don’t have more of them. Maybe then they wouldn’t have priced it so high to compensate for the lack of aesthetic choice in the game. Everyone I see wears the same three or four armor sets for their armor weight type. It’s pathetic.
I miss the simplicity of GW1’s endgame. When you get to Droknar’s, you’re forced to level 20 and whoops! Level 20 armor is here too! No rarities. Just one. It’s max AL armor. And it’s very cheap! You can also get better looking armor with the same stats later, although it’s a little more expensive. Should take a couple days of gathering materials, but that’s it. (And it looks AMAZING. Look at that Platemail! Wow!)
No boosters, no forge with mysterious gold sinks that never benefit you, no bizarre trading post scandals, no legendary weapons requiring billions of gold to create, no giant WoW design-influenced pauldrons, and better looking armor and weapons by a long shot.
GW2 is a huge step backwards in a lot of ways, mainly “because it’s now a true MMO.” Sigh.
There have been a lot of improvements, but it’s just not the same IP. A lot of the problems ANet promised to fix with MMORPGs in GW2 weren’t even in GW1 at all, yet mysteriously appeared in the second game. Just because. That’s very depressing to me. A true Guild Wars 2 would have been an excellent game. Unfortunately we got something that’s tainted with the smell of other current MMORPGs the developers obviously got enamored with at some point.
In between the mediocre skill selection, frantic and spammy combat, and myriad ways of losing money, inability to properly change your attributes whenever you want for free and the depressingly low amount of rewards in GW2, I get the impression that GW1 was better designed for its time, although 2 will end up being better remembered for what it tried to do, in terms of marketing. GW1 had its problems, mainly with balance tweaking and skill bloat over time, but they were very small problems compared to the ones GW2 has. I played it for years despite there being no “endgame” at all. GW2 just leave me feeling depressed, because I’m told to replay things I’ve already done continuously with the same tiny selection of skills, my traits locked, with insultingly low amounts of gold income while being surrounded by gold sinks, everywhere.
Hopefully a lot of this will be fixed over time, but I really think the things GW1 got right, ANet has just chosen to leave behind because certain people in their executive chairs were more concerned with streamlining internal production and maximizing profits and marketing for a wider audience than they were actually making the best game they could.
(edited by Plague.5329)
^ Crafters don’t have a trade. The sell prices of items you can create is usually lower than the cost of selling the materials for them. The only way to make money crafting is begging people in LA to use you as a service.
From what I hear, the problem isn’t with bugs during his final phase. It’s the final phase itself being unimaginative and dull. Forcing people to dodge things isn’t going to make it more memorable, just more of a nuisance. You should probably get your designers to redo the final part of the mission, into something worthy of the game. Especially considering it’s the final boss, it’s rather shameful it just degenerates into spamming cannon fire, regardless of whether you have to at times leave the controls or not.
I’ve never actually been to my home instance. The NPCs never mention it, and it’s not like there’s any real reason to go there, other than to get points of interest, I suppose. I guess if I liked the story more, I’d want to go check it out, but honestly, it’s all so disjointed and impersonal, I just don’t care at all.
Shouldn’t the rewards for the final mission ALWAYS be at least a single perfect, exotic weapon with a unique skin? Improving it to “at least Level 78+” is just another slap in the face. Where did the Guild Wars 1 design team go to? Were they fired? Did they play too much WoW and suddenly lose all bearing on reality and forget that Guild Wars is supposed to be a game about the player creating depth through a rich combat system while forgoing grind through accomplishments?
Seriously, guys. Get it together. You should get at least one level 80 exotic for completing the whole game. There is no excuse for this. You should be ashamed of yourselves. The people from other MMOs may accept that, but for GW1 players, that’s a huge step backwards, especially coming from a company purporting to attempt to kill off these old genre conventions.
Speaking from a GW1 perspective, when you played that game, you hit max level somewhat quickly, and spent 50% of the game there, doing the rest of the content. If you weren’t level 20 by the time you got to the Crystal Desert, the game basically forced you to be. As a result, all of the Shiverpeaks and the Fire Island Chain became endgame zones. With hard mode later, the whole map became endgame.
In GW2, sure, you’re downleveled, but the rewards for the areas are still not as good as Orr’s are, so no one bothers. It’s a waste of time to go back. I hesitate to say that because ANet’s usual response to such problems is to make the one viable alternative much worse, rather than making all the terrible ones good.
But Orr itself? Horrible. One or two ruins were interesting, but it’s generally a very messy area that’s very difficult to move around in. I know that’s the intent, but it really makes doing anything a huge nuisance. Risen are huge pests. They aren’t threatening, they’re just CC machines that ride on your back wherever you go.
Fun in combat systems is all about personal risk vs personal payoff. When you make fighting enemies more about dealing with THEIR moves vs pulling off risky ones yourself, you end up with annoying combat. Orr is all about this, and is probably the most unsatisfying region across GW1 and GW2 I’ve played to date.
But again, many problems are tied to rewards in GW2. There are none, except for a tiny area, and even then, they’re too few, and usually insulting. As such, people either have to grind that one little area or they just stop playing. I haven’t had much desire to log in myself, because I really hate having to bother with Risen constantly harassing me, stunning me, crippling me, freezing me, pulling me back to them while falling down themselves like morons, and so on. And this is out of combat. In combat they’re worthless and unthreatening. The whole of Orr feels like a lot of areas in GW1, where the challenge was trying to run past the enemies that were a waste of your time, and the enemies being designed to do nothing other than force you to fight an overly long encounter.
Just poor design, in general. Incredibly unsatisfying, very unrewarding. Even if you did improve the rewards throughout the game to encourage people to do content anywhere, Risen are still so annoying that you’d have the inverse problem, in which no one would go to Orr because it’s too much of a hassle. Maybe to farm rare materials, I guess? But in between the new farm code and the market problems, those don’t even drop anymore.
The whole game is a big mess, mainly due to ANet being more concerned with suppressing our income rather than being concerned with how much fun we’re having. Orr is just the lighthouse in an ocean of trouble, instead leading you into more disaster.
WvW is the best way to get karma, as long as you’re constantly taking things, losing them, then taking them again. PvE in no way compares. If you’re farming DEs in Orr for karma, you’re probably wasting your time.
There was only one story mission I actually could not get past due to its difficulty. I actually rarely died on any of them, although some did seem too difficult given I was being downleveled for them.
The one mission I had issue with was one where you were killing some leader of the Svanir and his giant ice dog monster. I can’t remember the context because honestly, it wasn’t very important. But you had to kill the giant ice dog before his master, which proved next to impossible because he simply did so much damage that you couldn’t even kill his minion before you got downed, much less him. I had to zone out and repair my armor probably three times before I eventually managed a victory, and only because I stopped trying to mitigate all the damage and instead just DPSed the monster down as quickly as I could, just to get it off the field. I died, revived and then finished the cheater, who otherwise always revived as long as the dog was alive. All this was frustrating at the time, as in the betas I’d done the same mission with no problems. AND I was being downleveled this time, with armor above what was required.
I think what’s memorable about personal story difficulties is that if it’s too hard, you have to wait around for a patch that may never even come. It’s just there, and you can’t skip it. You can only wait, and hope ANet recognizes that it’s indeed too difficult.
For their future campaigns, I’d like to see less focus on choosing paths. I know, I know. “LESS options? Madness!” But let’s face it, the story paths weren’t exactly dissimilar. And creating these junctions in any story tends to fragment the narrative and remove any sense of flow from the story.
I think the dragons need to actually have a voice, from beginning to end. If you asked me who the villain was in GW2 vanilla, I really couldn’t tell you. There’s Zhaitan, of course, but he’s just the big monster you kill at the end. What was his objective? What was his character? What was the personal relationship he had with the character? These are important components to establishing an antagonist, and they just never come up in the story, at all. The closest we get is some disjointed conversation with the Eyes that doesn’t particularly go anywhere or seem to have any real purpose within the context of advancing the story.
If you’re making a story about advancing on an antagonist (like this one), one of the first things you need to do is introduce that villain very early, either by proxy or directly. You don’t wait until level 50 to do this; you do it in the opening cutscene, when at all possible. Again, either directly (the “attack on the village” scenario), or by proxy (why are the centaurs attacking us? apparently zhaitan is driving them out of their homelands and they’re desperate for supplies and etc etc).
I feel like all the gimmick player choices do more to hurt the story than help it. When you partition a story into possible outcomes, you marginalize the importance of the overall theme, which is the core component to any story, ever. It’d be like if at the end of The Godfather, you could also get an ending where they fly back to Europe and live as farmers. Sure, it’s another possibility. But that’s not the point of telling a story.
I feel like a lot was not handled well in the personal story, and probably mainly due to the focus being on creating the missions, when it should have been on catering the missions to tell a story. If the next BBEG is Jormag, I’d hope that it opens with you having a confrontation with Jormag himself, or a smaller avatar of him. I’d also hope much of the story is spent elaborating on the depth of Jormag’s personality (more than “he is a big evil monster,” its motivations, and ultimately a confrontation between the two of you. If there’s another Tybalt type character, and another similar situation, I’d also hope that Jormag himself strikes him down. Having these kinds of characters go out on their own terms, killed offscreen by witless common enemies does very little to motivate the player against the primary villain. (It actually made me think they were just prepping for a scene later.)
Just to sum it all up: care more about the characters & their interactions and less about the missions they’re involved in (which are barely of importance at all, just the ideas they convey). I read a book and watch a movie for the people in it, not for visuals or effects. Just the same, if I play through a story path in a game, I’m not doing it thinking “What inventive mission awaits me next!? Oh be quiet, NPC. You’re stalling the next loading screen!”
My best feedback is, writing is best done by one person. Understandably you need to consider game design in this case, but generally, the fewer the people involved (and especially minimizing the teams involved) results in a more cohesive story.
My impression (and others) with GW2’s story is that the focus was on the mechanics of progression and leading players from one idea for a mission type to the next, and not necessarily that the missions flowed naturally from an original vision or narrative.
The most success you had with the story, IMO, was with the secondary characters. (Apples, etc.) Without going into a very long analysis of the events, those were the moments of real connection with the universe, as they were the most basic and human of experiences in the game. I don’t know who was responsible for those characters or what they were in the timeline of creative input, but… yeah, more of that. Give that guy the keys.
I get the feeling they wanted one of the races to be the “WoW look” race. Many of the armors look ridiculous on norn males, as a result. Massive pauldrons, mainly.
Wait… the story wasn’t even written by your writers? One just sat in to editorialize it? That’s… okay…
Wait. So, if the writers didn’t do the writing, what do the writers DO exactly?
One thing I imagine that hurts is that the things you’d usually spend real money on to circumvent grind aren’t present in GW2, and the things that are grindy are VERY grindy. As a result, buying gems is pointless, as you’d literally need hundreds of USD to get enough gems to convert to get what you want. So, no gem purchases.
CCs in games, in general, IMO are usually bad things. You need some form of them, but they should always be minor and when chained one after the other, either stop working or actually punish the person attempting to abuse them.
It mitigates the other player entirely and turns combat into masturbation for the other player, with the opponent just being a silent, unmoving punching bag. In GW2’s case, the counters are usually one-shots or things you have to use beforehand, and don’t particularly work well compared to some other games. Of course, it could be worse. Still, CCs really dominate sPvP at times. You also know ANet knows how powerful they are because in all their “difficult” zones and content, the enemies mainly just chain stun you or have constant KDs, or similar. Generally, it makes them incredibly annoying.
My problem with the Forge is that it is VERY expensive to make anything, even if you know it, and the result is usually either trash or something that makes way less money than the investment you put into it. It’s just a big trash can you throw your money into.
Just wait for Elona. You’ll get your fill of tone variation, and will see more sand that you ever wanted to see in your entire life.
Games are payoff reward systems. The amount of spacing you have in between rewards controls how much fun people have over time. If you throw too much at people, it gets overwhelming and ridiculous. If you withhold content and tell people to repeat things for hours at a time to get something new, it stops being fun.
I think the people saying that you shouldn’t be playing for rewards are probably either delusional fanboys or just haven’t played the game enough. “You can do dungeons, you can go back to old zones, etc” Yes, we’ve all heard that. And we’ve all done that. Multiple times. It stops being fun after a while if there is no payout. There has to be incremental systems of rewards in any game, or you just end up repeating the same experience over and over again. If you don’t understand why people would tire of this and move on to other experiences (other games), then there is no hope for you at all, and you are most likely a fanboy who learned to parrot ANet’s marketing points before release, but doesn’t actually understand any of them.
Level 80 Warrior
6.5/10
The problem, as I see it, is a lack of content, and a lack of reward.
For example, let’s say in your game you have one armor set. Just one, aside from the starter set. The entire rest of the game is spent trying to get this armor. It will take you probably a year of gameplay to get it. This obviously is not fun. Idiots in this game will refer to this as a prestigious accomplishment, and that you should just enjoy the game until you get it. People with more sense will just quit.
Now, consider another game. There are 500 armor sets in this game. Getting just one is fairly simple, and they all look different from one another, meaning you’ll be hard pressed to collect them all. Not that you’d probably want to. The gameplay orients itself towards giving you fairly constant rewards. You won’t trip and fall onto a new armor set, but they are common enough that you can look at one you want, then go get it in a couple of days.
Now, which of these two is more sensible? This is GW2’s problem. There’s a lot of area, but not much content because the rewards are so scarce. There should be more than one armor set per dungeon. In general, there should be five times the amount of available end game armor sets than there are now. Counting all the generic ones low level players wear is simply trying to cover up the lack of content at the end of the game. It should be possible to craft more than just Draconic. When you invest in learning a new recipe from the forge, producing the result should far exceed your investment’s worth (it doesn’t).
GW2 is full of these problems, where your only endgame goal is going to be aesthetics, yet changing your look becomes nightmarishly difficult because there’s almost no options, other than to just go back to wearing scale, gladiator armor, karma gear, or so on.
I imagine this will get better over time. GW1 had a very similar problem, in that there were almost no aesthetic choices at the endgame, until they started focusing on it.
Eventually, when I run a dungeon, I expect to get something like 100-150 tokens, and return to the vendor and find after five runs I can buy one of ten full sets of armor available from these tokens.
See, fun hinges a lot on rewards in games. When you space out rewards, it kills the fun, because you become more and more aware of what you’re doing, especially if it’s repeating the same content, over and over again. I’m almost to 100% map completion, and I have a single complete armor set. That’s bad.
This is a vast, vast problem, and much of it is tied to the developers spacing things out, and players not understanding the problem and just blaming one another for being entitled, when in fact this is a design issue; and in design, the fault always rests with the designer. Revisiting old zones should have a similar token system. Otherwise, you have situations like the one we have now, where the most efficient means to get a new reward is just grinding Orr all day – where you get the most gold, the best drops and the most expedient means to circumvent an otherwise long, long grind.
Hopefully the developers will understand this post better than much of the naive fan base.
(edited by Plague.5329)
It’s a mobility thing. It’s 100% worthless in sPvP, of course. It’s almost essential in WvW, as you’ll be able to completely circumvent some roads by falling where others would die. Same in PvE. It also has some hilarious results when sneak attacking people from above.
Again, it’s more something you use in between fights for ignoring terrain and getting places by “cheating.” The Strength line is full of worthless or otherwise boring traits. It’s the min-max line.
I think Vengeance would be fine if it was a passive ability you activated that only triggered after being spiked or losing all your health, not as a “Kill Me” button. The hammer is a joke, but at least we do a lot of damage with our rocks. I guess.
The idea is we have both the worst downed state and the best, but honestly, that “best” part doesn’t show up very often. It’s usually on high recharge. At least we’re not Elementalists.