Guild Wars 2

Really against a level increase. I love GW2 because there is no gear treadmill, no invalidation of gear. Going to level 100 would require grinding out new sets of exotics and if this became the norm for expansions then it does essentially mean a gear treadmill. Madness.

In addition to that, current high level zones would become much easier with the addition of new traits to level 100. I was kinda hoping in 5 years time we would have a plethora of level 80 zones to choose from when I login. Otherwise we will just be funneled into the latest expansions max level zone.

Will be a very sad day for me when they officially announce the level cap increase.

At least GW2 has made some strides over the original. I don’t think I could have played Guild Wars 1 without a second screen with the wiki open at the same time.

I am encountering this very often myself.

Unable to target through clicking, can only target with tab.

That whole area in Wayfarer’s Foothills is rife with events. Great place to get your daily events done quick as well. Really fun zone in general.

Turning it into a currency also gets rid of the risk of accidentally deleting them.

Vasham.2408:

angan.6572:

In a game with no group forming system, i don’t see why there shouldn’t be a solo option.

Because if you can’t handle a story mode dungeon then you have no right to step into an explorable dungeon. Fact.

Disregarding Vasham’s hostile tone, there is a good point here. If story modes are soloable then new players may have even less preparation when going into explorable for the first time.

There should be a ramp of difficulty from the easiest of group content all the way to the hardcore top.

The OP is worried about story mode nerfs cascading down into all other challenging content. However I am worried that group instance content will remain hostile and uninviting without a gradient of difficulties. Lets hope Anet can find the balance since a binary position of all hard or all easy is not a good place.

Games can exist containing group content with more than one difficulty level. I want to play a game with a variety of difficulties depending on how much time and energy I have available.

The game does seem pretty stacked against those who just want to travel the open world. It’s a lot harder to get decent money and if you mostly solo it feels like there is a pretty large barrier to doing many sets of dungeons.

Bohun Martell.8963:

3. There is a problem here, but this is not a “sword” problem. Dodge interrupts every possible action except leap. Becouse dodge is supposed to interrupt actions, it is not queued. So when You try to dodge in the middle of the leap, dodge do not work and is forgotten. It should be a general fix that dodge, when not executed immediately, should queue just after current action (leap). Same with stomp btw.

I think dodge entering the ability queue would be a bad idea.

I agree with you HERO.

The final event was painful for me. The reinforcement phases were really badly designed, did arenanet put a 0 in the wrong place?. Many people went afk (including me). All those phases needed was to have two champion mobs appear for us to kill and then move on. Fighting the same 2 mob types for 30 mins was just abusive.

I felt like I had committed to deep at that point to leave either. Since there was no indication of how long the even would take (30 mins or 4 hours) it felt like a risk to just leave when it could be finished in 5 minutes!

I think this event could have been fun if:

- The first foray into the mountain didn’t happen. (Why was it necessary to go up and down the ramps twice during the evening?)

- The event started with the tree collapsing on the ancient karka.

- The reinforcements were a few champion mobs. Champion mobs drop loot.

- The whole thing would take about 45-60 mins.

I think that would be far better pacing and enjoyable as the phases between the endless mob killing were actually quite fun. I would have gone to bed satisfied rather than just plain tired and frustrated.

One exceedingly laggy fight where the mobs only just spawned before they died. I am not entirely sure I hit anything over a period of 5 minutes.

Brian.9125:

Not that I agree with the OP’s attitude, but there is something to say for the massive skill requirement leap from world pve to dungeons. Maybe world pve needs to be harder, dungeons need to be easier or there needs to be something in-between, but I think it does alienate the not-so-hardcore gamers who had an ok time leveling when they decide to try out a dungeon and get their rear ends handed to them.

I think you are correct here.

There will be a few different expectations players bring with them to dungeons. I imagine the main ones to be previous MMO experience and/or GW2 world pve experience. Previous MMO experience of starting dungeons are very very easy and so is the GW2 pve experience.

People will come into AC thinking it’s a starter dungeon and be handed a very painful lesson in how to get your face mashed in. That maybe enough to put an awful lot of players off who might have been willing to learn if there was a more forgiving difficulty curve introducing dungeons.

ExcretusMaximus.9120:

Turgon.8625:

Why on earth does this not work like WoW’s transmogrification system

Because this is not WoW.

How very clever (and witty!!) of you to point out.

Cutsforhugs.9730:

All I could see was basically: "People want one of the big “endgame” things in GW2 more casual and flexible."

Sorry, nope.

I hope they don’t implement a system where you only need to get an item once and then you can always change model with it. It works in WoW for example because that’s just a mediocre thing with no real purpose at all. Besides, even their system isn’t all that great.

People have to realize this is a different game with different rules. And difficulty is never a bad thing.

And they have to learn to some extension that IF you decide to change your armor with something expensive, you only change it with something you plan to use for a long time.

That’s called (in some sense) being moderate, and it’s fine.

I guess they could have something like, once you got the set you can buy it ON THAT CHARACTER ONLY for a reduced price or something.

But never, ever remove the price in full.

Sine when has flexibility been viewed as a bad thing? Casual…well that’s a term that has a changing definition and is highly debatable over whether it’s a bad thing or not. let’s not get into that here.

‘Difficulty is never a bad thing’ – Not sure about the relevance of this here. If your saying all endgame content should be difficult I disagree but yeah, not sure on the relevance. If your saying that it adds difficulty to have to farm two sets of the same gear I also disagree.

I don’t really value time based difficulty very highly. That might just be me though. If you have overcome the difficulty many times repeating dungeons to get the gear in the first place having to do it a second time is a test of patience not a further test of skill.

Just to clarify for you though – I am not against really really difficult stuff. Especially when earning good looking sets of armour. I just think once the time has been invested into earning it it should be a permanent unlock (for that character).

I worry about situations where you make a +heal based set, transmute it with 100g worth of cultural gear and then heal or skills get nerfed next patch making your set redundant and your money wasted.

That’s when I want some flexibility.

I think the economy definitely needs to be balanced if adopting a wardrobe/collections feature that allows for one time skin unlocks.

A good way to do it is to have a gem charge for each time you transmute an item or remove a transmutation. This gem cost could be quite high.

This way you are still effectively having to play the game a lot to make use of the cosmetic system (to get money for gems) but you can then play the way you want to, be it getting gold from WvW, DE’s etc.

Hellkaiser.6025:

I wholeheartedly am trying to see your points, and am not assuming you’re whingeing so apologies if I came across that way. Realistically if you want the gear it’s there but you will have to repeat content and honestly, it’s the BEST way of increasing your skill level with a class, working out combo’s between other players and seeing what works with what is rewarding and fun, for some.

I guess it’s a matter of replay-ability, if we didn’t have to repeatedly unlock the dungeon skins then eventually when people made alts, they would no longer need to do the dungeons, and then that places them in the awkward situation of going back on their own claims that they wouldn’t implement a random dungeon auto finder system “a la” WoW.

There is a bigger picture in play, and whilst at first our eyes which have gotten lazy at the fast food content changes and systems of modern mmo’s can’t see this, but over time if you really think about things there’s a lot more going on than you can see at first, you just gotta refocus and look at what’s better for EVERYONE, as opposed to just yourself, or those who haven’t got hours per day to play.

They will progress, as will you. But it will just take you a little longer til you can organise things better, I spend a lot of time LFG spamming in chat in L.A for groups, the hours I’m online are not always spent “productively” or “efficiently”

Perhaps if you were to look into a guild who focuses on dungeon teams they could help fit into your schedule and you’d get that “grind” outta the way in a far more efficient manner than even a borderline no-lifer loser like me :P

I think you may misunderstand. I don’t have an issue with finding dungeon groups, I am already in an organised guild who are quite productive around WvW and dungeons. As I said though, if I have already spent time one weekend working on unlocking a skin I’d perhaps like to play some WvW the following weekend without feeling I need to get a second copy of that skin to cover up my magic find set.

I think it would appear that I was whinging if it weren’t for the fact that games like World of Warcraft, Rift and Lord of the Rings have already implemented systems along the lines of what I am suggesting. I can unlock a skin once in WoW and use it on my PvP healing set and my PvE tanking set.

I do admit though that this is definitely a case of me being spoilt in other games and hoping to see some of that rub off over here.

Hellkaiser.6025:

All any of those pieces will cost you is 2 days doing each path ONCE

I am not in a hurry but at the same time there is already far more that I want to do in this game then I have time for. I am not asking for easy unlocks for all gear. Having said that if I have earned the gear from a dungeon once I feel it should be a permanently unlocked skin and not a one time only use(if I wanted to apply the look to or have another look applied to it then it’s used up).

To clarify here I am not viewing the dungeons (or any other gear earning gameplay) as a ‘grind’ that I would not play if they did not provide rewards. There are just so many things I’d like to be doing in the game I don’t want to feel obligated to stay in one place.

I think doing a combination of WoW’s transmog system and GW2’s collection system would be ideal.

For those who don’t know about how Warcraft’s Transmogrification system works:

- You walk up to an NPC wearing the gear you want to change the appearance of.
- Talking to the NPC brings up an interface with slots for all armour slots.
- Drag items from your inventory into these slots to change the appearance at the cost of gold per slot.
- Walk away wearing your gear with a new skin as well as the other items still in your inventory.
- Return at any point to undo the appearance change or change to a new look.

If this were combined with GW2’s collection interface any armour you find can be ‘collected’. This wouldn’t involve moving an item to a bank at all but simply ‘unlocks’ the skin in a collection interface.

When you went to the transmogrification NPC you would select from you collections tab instead of dragging an item from your inventory.

I’ll throw this in the suggestion forum later but what do people think?

synk.6907:

And the trebuchet bit should have just been something you interacted with, like in GW 1 missions, that didn’t need aiming. No matter how long you take or how often you miss, the situation does not get worse on the island. So just remove the mini game and make it a player-triggered mini-custscene.

This mission emphasized that killing mobs isn’t often the goal of personal story missions. I guess the idea is to not let people grind the undead for XP, but shrug I wasn’t really motivated to fight enemies in personal story missions anymore after the mission.

Good call on the trebuchet. That would be much smoother. Especially if you are given an order by an NPC to man a trebuchet and when you do a cutscene shows your trebuchet and a bank of other trebuchets firing at the same time.

I like missions where killing is not your goal, even if it is the goal of your allies around you. It’s an issue when you are not sure whether you are meant to be killing or meant to be running straight passed.

I’m definitely for a move to a ‘wardrobe’ style system or a ‘collections/library’ based system.

They don’t “make you”. You’re the only person who take the decision of having 2.

Ok sure, that phrasing was too extreme.

What they have done is make a system that requires far more farming and inventory management than the equivalent system of many other games.

I don’t get why people aren’t more concerned by this. It’s because the game is about acquiring cosmetic skins that I’m frustrated that you lose a skin when you transmute one.

Like I said, the WoW system is far more elegant. I earned my tier 8 set and if I want my tier 9 and 10 set to look like that I can. If I want to then change back the look of my transformed tier 9 and 10 back to their originals I can as well.

It costs gold to do all these things and it could cost gems or gold in this game I don’t mind. Just don’t make me farm the same set twice if I don’t want to. I have enough things I want to do in this game thankyou very much.

I am at the stage where I am looking at different dungeon skins and cultural sets as well as there stats but I am a little worried about the way the transmutation stones seem to work by their description.

Do you permanently lose the item you use to change another items appearance by?
Is that transmuted item permanently changed to that skin with no way to revert?

If the answer is yes to these then this is utterly utterly horrible.

This would mean that if I wanted to have one skin for two sets with different stats I would have to get two copies of the skin. In the case of cultural armour that would be unbelievably expensive.

If I had one set with the correct stats but wanted to switch between two different skins (say the original skin and another) then I would have to grind out two sets of the original skin. In the case of dungeon armour that is a ridiculous amount of work.

I am aghast at this system, the idea of destroying hard earned gear is just not an option I want to pursue.

Why on earth does this not work like WoW’s transmogrification system where you do not lose either the original items appearance or the item that you use to transmute with. You could still charge gems for the actual transformation if the worry is the loss of income.

I would be far more likely to spend gems on a WoW like system then the current.

Right now the cost isn’t just gems ( I don’t mind about that) but an entire armour set.

They promised a lot, tried to do a lot and failed.

Ultimately a better use of the PS budget would have been to cut down all the hollow choices and focus on one storyline that was coherent and had actually fun missions in. A solid single player RPG basically.

Sure every player would have had a similar story but at least it would have stood a chance at being good.

Be hopeful it’s the only change you encounter. My personal story flipped onto the rails of a different set of choices at about level 70. I saw a large thread about it with Dev’s asking for feedback.

I doubt anything can be done for us people have already gone passed the moment. They will just have to fix it for new characters.

Bleh.

I quite liked the different mechanics and phases. However as others have highlighted the fight feels artificially long and there feels no threat what so ever to my health.

I would have preferred a much shorter but far more dangerous encounter where my health might actually drop for a moment or too long enough to make me think.

Just another disappointing personal story mission unfortunately.

There were times whenI didn’t know if I was even doing the right thing and wondering if I was bugged and then the fight ended.

Yeah, that feeling of not knowing if I am doing the right thing or not is a problem. There have been times when I have actually been doing the wrong thing and so have become very aware of this.

One of the issues is definitely with the respawning in an area mechanic. Most world DE’s have ‘wave’ mechanics or ‘strength’ mechanics both providing far more feedback of what’s going on.

Mobs respawning in an area, often right in front of your eyes is the biggest immersion breaker. Even if the ‘wave’ mechanic is essentially respawning mobs as well, you feel less aware of it and it feels more logical.

[SPOILERS AHEAD]

I had a very unpleasant experience with my first character on this mission. So much so that it tainted the feeling I had for PS for the rest of the game. I decided to carefully analyse the issues I had with it on my second character.

Watch Commander Talon This character is weak. He is a ‘general’ but shows no sign of experience or leadership. He skulks underneath an archway for the entire mission disregarding the advice that has come directly from his sub-commanders on the front until he finally and quite randomly dies. Should we feel sympathy when he says his final ‘heroic’ line?

Why is this character here? I was wondering if it were for comedy. ‘You are just a scholar not a general what do you know about warfare?’ he spouts to Trahearne just moments before a cut-scene of a ship appearing out of the water. If it weren’t for the serious tone of the rest of the mission I would say it was trying to be funny.

You are also forced throughout the whole mission to run back and forth between the latest objective and his hiding place under the arch. This messes with the pacing. Instead of reacting to a battle field we are turning in the latest quest and picking up the next one.

Finally and most importantly for me, he demeans the threat of the undead. By this I mean, I feel the battle of claw island was lost not because the undead are a menacing threat to be reckoned with but due to the incompetence of Claw Islands commander. By this same note, the loss of your mentor also feels utterly wasted and without meaning. It’s not the undead’s fault Sieran died, it’s Talon’s. This really really jars with me.

Bad Mission Pacing I have touched on Talon’s contribution to dodgy pacing but there are many things in this mission that cause this:

- Lot’s of cutscenes: These pull control from the character and add very little atmosphere.

- Trebuchet mission: – I have all the time in the world to complete this. I missed for 5 minutes and then eventually got a hit in. There was no urgency or risk. It broke up the flow of the mission yet again.

- Back and forth: Going back and forth between Talon and the frontline throughout the whole mission felt like a very artificial way of moving the story on.

- Courtyard Fight: Throughout the mission so far there have been a mixture of re-spawning enemies and fixed ones. It feels very unclear at any one point whether an enemy is dead for good or will come back. This makes the courtyard battle feel very strange. There is no timer and there is no bar (like in dynamic events) showing ‘Enemy strength’. There are very little lionguard to actually help and there are many undead just standing still in the courtyard. I am unsure whether the mission wants me to kill enough undead to move the mission on or just survive a hidden timer.

- The final exit and cutscene: So your friend pointlessly kills herself/himself and now you are faced with a dock full of static mobs you need to clear out to finish the mission. The pacing has changed once again from a frantic battle to a leisurely exit. The mission ends with a music-less cut scene of a flat looking boat leaving a calm looking scene. No destruction, no haste, no emotion.

Bad Gameplay The mobs seem to have far more hitpoints that normal world mobs. They don’t drop any loot and they don’t provide any experience. This generally makes the fighting a very negative experience and makes me want to run passed every mob I can. This is exactly what I did in my second more ‘savvy’ play through.

Considering how much fun even just soloing in the actual world is, I find it surprising that a completely tailored experience for a solo player is so utterly poor in gameplay.

Conclusion I put the failure of this mission to entertain down to poor characters, poor pacing and poor gameplay. I find it unlikely that Anet will go back and fix this but I really wanted to provide my feedback to perhaps help steer and future PS missions created.

Thanks for reading.

@Sky: I am not sure what side of the discussion you are on. Do you think the Dynamic Events AoE Zerg should be changed or not?

I see your point about it being difficult for the Devs to add challenge into a game built around it’s current mechanics. I think it’s an interesting point as I think GW2 has raised the skill ceiling a bit when compared to other hotkey MMO’s like WoW and SWToR. It isn’t at the twitch reaction level of RTS and FPS games but it is moving in the right direction.

With that in mind I think they have a lot of options that could be pulled in to make DE’s more challenging. The system is in early days yet, let’s hope they try and push the boundaries a bit now the game is out.

rozcinana.7249:

I hope things improve before I make it farther in the game. I participated in my first – and last – zerg last week in the straits of devastation. I’ve been having a blast so far until that point. It killed the fun completely. Now i’m not looking forward to the level 80 areas at all.

Don’t be too discouraged. I love Orr, it is beautiful and often deadly, especially when solo. Not all events are an AoE zerg.

I am providing a lot of criticism to Orr in this forum not because I hate the place but because I love the zone and what the devs are trying to achieve there. I just think they have missed their target slightly – probably due to live servers acting differently to their internal pre-launch testing environments.

The sooner we get away from this concept of ‘Endgame’ the better. It’s handicapping the way we think of the genre.

I can’t wait for a game that takes levels away completely (GWs was very close to doing this). Then people really will be confused on how to define endgame.

That’s a shame if people are already asking for EM nerfs. To be fair, so far ANet have been steadfast in not submitting to the cries as of yet. Early days though.

Also, despite being a lot easier the story mode dungeons are definitely not trivial. You really can’t just run in and aoe everything down like in WoW. If you are not paying attention, you will die and wipe. I think that is refreshing.

The giants/abominations are particularly boring. Just one massive health bar and very little to think about.

[Quote] They should downscale better. That means:
a) Make us weaker in low-level areas. As of now I am too strong when I play in a level 20 area as level 80 character, allegedly downscaled to level 22.
b) Give us karma, gold, xp like in level 80 areas.
c) Give us level adequate loot like in Orr.
Then it would be the same (loot-/xp-/karma-/goldwise) if I play in Kessex Hills or Cursed Shore. And that would be a very good thing because the high level player would spread all over the world.[/Quote]

I was very disapointed when I found it this was not going to be the case, I had the impression for a long time that this was the whole point of downscaling and you could actually go where you want without missing out on rewards.

This certainly suits the design of the world. I do remember seeing a developer say that if this was the case then players would not feel the need to progress from zone to zone.

However, I think with the personal story and one time only heart completion as well as the general urge to explore new places this wouldn’t actually be too big an issue whilst leveling.

I would love to see this as well. I don’t want to feel punished for playing the character that only has a small pool of karma and will not be using the karma vendor’s.

The karma vendor gear costs so much at 80 that it really takes dedicated farming with one character discouraging the use of alts. This makes me sad

Veltoss.9135:

no one wants this game to be too easy

This might be going a bit far. I am sure there are many people attracted to this game for the story and creating a beautiful character in a rich world and are not even thinking about how they are going to be challenged at level 80.

There should be a broad range of difficulties. Getting to polarized in either direction will exclude people for no good reason.

you got a point.
But please enlighten me what you think defines challenging in your oppinion then, because I am not seeing it in GW2. The amount of ppl wanting to nerf the already easy dungeons is crazy and reminds me of how WoW players started before blizzard nerfed everything to suit a 6 year old.

I am not seeing it in the world yet either. I can’t speak for explorable dungeons as I have not tried them yet (some people say they are hard, some people not so much). Certainty the intent of the developers is for the really hard stuff to be contained safely away in instances.

I still think Orr events need to be changed from what they are now to a tougher less zerg friendly form. After all, you still get rewarded even if an event fails and it often opens up new events through that. I really can’t see any strength in the arguments to keep them in their current form.

@Liavain: It is already the case that you get credit for aiding downed people in a dynamic event. Healing doesn’t really make much difference as there are so little heals in the game.

Also, I emphasise again the problem isn’t getting the medal it’s that Zerg AoE events are not fun and are broken gameplay.

Mada makes a good point that one of the issues is that they all run in bunched up down one path. Even if each wave comes down a different path, the waves happen one at a time so it makes no difference.

There are actually some good outpost wave defence events in Malchor’s Leap where multiple waves come in from different directions at the same time making it harder to AoE them down. I have seen many of these fail and have to retake the Outposts after which can also be hard. This is far far more fun.

Indeed, Joker.

Loxias, we simply think that the AoE zerg is bad gameplay. Whether you get a gold medal or not. It’s just not that fun.

I really don’t think the amount of time it takes to do something is really any indicator of difficulty Zingery?

I mean, it is a test of patience I suppose. In that sense it is quite challenging.

I think the sooner mmo’s get away from the reputation of being incredibly time consuming due to having to repeat the same tasks over and over again the better. Those kind of games can still exist for gamers like Zingery but should not define the genre.

I doubt Arenanet are going to go down the root of excluding people access to Orr through difficulty.

The really challenging stuff has been clearly segmented into instances.

Orr, as I understand it, is the place for level 80s to hang out and do stuff, no skill requirements needed. This does not mean that dynamic events should not be able to fail and that mobs should fall over as soon as they get near a group of players.

Sounds fun. Definitely need to see more events failing. The fact that they rarely do shows that something is wonky with event scaling.

I want to feel like the fact that I am an experienced, skilled player makes a difference to the outcome of the battle. Right now my presence is irrelevant, events will always succeed if there are players present. Who they are and how well they work together is just not a factor.

Throw an enemy counter zerg at a group of players and suddenly it might matter if they are skilled and working together or not.

Leo.6817:

snip

Hey Leo, it’s good to see someone bringing up the other side of the argument. Forums can easily snowball on one side of a discussion if people aren’t careful.

I am firmly on the side of Orr needs to be tuned harder right now though. However, I would not class myself as a hardcore gamer anymore. I have not done any explorable modes yet and I just get an hour or so in the evenings to play.

I don’t think the call from the forums so far has been to make Orr as unforgiving and difficult as dungeons. I think what most people are trying to address are the tendencies for large groups of players to sit outside outposts and AoE waves of enemies so quickittenhat they are dead before they are even rendered.

This is not even ‘easy’ gameplay it’s a new type of challenge that is actually quite difficult. Get your AoE in quicker than everyone else’s in order to tag as many mobs as possible. It’s quite a challenge really.

This is not a call for hardcore mode in Orr. This is a call for working dynamic events that are balanced to the amount of players present.

3 seconds is a bit of an exaggeration don’t you think?

It’s more like under a second!

This zone would transform over night if these events were tweaked and suddenly became difficult.

They would just be so much more…..dynamic!

(sorry)

The AoE mob tagging game that Orr has turned into is horrible.

Event difficulty and event scaling needs a serious look into if this beautiful looking zone is to have it’s gameplay salvaged.

I am so very behind the concept of level 80 zones driven by pure dynamic events and I am desperate for the tweaks to come in asap for the vision of this idea to come into existence.

Right now, I go there to explore but participating in anything is not fun at all.

I find it interesting how Anet said they didn’t want the game to change wants you hit level 80 ‘The endgame starts at level 1’ philosophy’.

The game does change at level 80 – it turns into a reaction game outside outposts to see who can put their aoe down first to catch a kitten of health from the incoming waves of enemies. This is not the endgame I was expecting.

I remember in beta weekend 1 some of the centuar attacks in the first human zone being brutally over-tuned, it was great. I was kind of hoping for a similar or harder kind of difficulty to be in Orr.

The reason I don’t like Trahearne is not because he upstages the player char or that he is a particularly boring but sensible leader.

It’s that he is a bad Sylvari. I find it really hard to believe this guy is only 25 years old with very little experience of the world other than the dream planted in his head at birth.

I love the Sylvari because the interesting ones are full of inquisitiveness. They are driven but at the same time very innocent. They are generally bubbling over with enthusiasm and personality even if they lack a bit of wisdom and common sense.

Trahearne has none of these qualities. If he was human, the voice acting and script might have worked. He would just be a slightly boring leader character. As a sylvari, he jarrs with my expectations badly.

Reihert.1509:

I surely hope so.
More content is always wanted.
On the other hand, MoP release will do a lot of good to our community.

What will it do to help our community? :S

Mmmm looks fun. I’ll try it out tomorrow night and let you know how I get on.

The thing I worry about with bugs in the personal story line is that they are one time affairs.

It’s not like a broken dynamic event which you can just come back to in a few days and find it’s working again. Once a personal story mission is done it is finished, never to go back to. Any bug fixing done now ain’t going to help me unless Anet decide to roll me back a few missions in the story. I can’t see them doing that.