This being a game with no monthly fee, don’t forget that there are people like me who play a “gear grind” MMORPG (LoTRO in my case) AND this game at the same time. I play LoTRO for my fix of lore PvE, gear grinding, raid running. Then I go to GW2 to just relax and just do whatever I feel like doing at the time.
I can respect that there are people who like the precedent that this patch starts. I agree that the Fractals for the most part are wonderfully designed. I go in there for fun. If my friends need me to play with them I join in and just enjoy the experience. If I find that I need to grind to get Infused Ascended gear to go on and I don’t already have it, then I would probably just move on and go do something else in the game. Of course SPvP and WvW needs some more attention. But that’s another discussion.
The dungeon – what little I’ve done of it – looks fun and relatively well designed so far. I can even forgive the Swamp Fractal – it’s a cool idea, it’s just needs some sort of a balance pass.
But I do agree with what’s already been said. The reason I played this game is because of the lack of a really involved gear grind – and the idea of playing the game how I want to play it and still be relatively viable, my skill as a player being the main reason for success. So, Ascended gear and Agony is completely against the reason I played this game in the first place. Not that I don’t like gear-grinding mind you, but it’s not the reason I played this game. I play LoTRO for that.
That being said, being a long time and current player of LoTRO, I can confirm what people already mentioned. Radiance was so badly received that Turbine apologized for it (in a Dev Diary no less) before removing all traces of it completely. Please do not make the same mistake.
As an aside – the new way of acquiring current end-game gear in Riders of Rohan (by rebuilding a destroyed town with daily quests) is an infinitely more fun grind than what I’ve seen in GW2 so far. Not only because it fits the story of the landscape so well, but also because you can actually see visible signs of your progress (the town being rebuilt).
Engineers excel at combos. I know that might not actually be directly related to a role, but it really is noticeable when in group play against large numbers of enemies.
This I agree with. We have a decent number of accessible Blast Finishers.
It’s lovely for PvE. I have a Mesmer I work with and between the 2 of us, we can coordinate putting up AoE Chaos Armor.
I use it for SPvP too when I’m playing with people who like putting down fields (Guardians, Elementalists)
I personally don’t think it’s fair to call out the entire server of Yak’s for the hacking of a few players.
But yeah, maybe people just don’t like the name of the server? >_>
Is Yak’s Bend supposed to be a real location in the lore or something? Sorry, not that informed about place names.
Like that Zelda picture kinda showed, the Longbow Healer/Priest-type Character is a fairly well used archetype in Japanese games/literature. I’m not entirely sure if it’s limited to Japan, but there’s that image of the Longbow as a sort of Spiritual Weapon. In that sense, it fits in that spiritual/magical aspect of the Guardian (not as much the Holy Soldier part).
Of course there’s also that other argument of how the Archer archetype in general is used to show femininity. But that’s another conversation altogether.
