Guild Wars 2

ElectricGoat.8253:

How do I get more of those boxes? I used the first one up and got a sprocket out of it. I want more sprockets.

I’m guessing the only way is through the gem store?

Only way to get sprocket is the gem store, but many of the individual items are on the TP right now as well.

Ashivan.5216:

Vayne.8563:

Clearly that won’t work for everyone but there were plenty of players who were bored with how easy the open world is that aren’t particularly found of either instances or grouping. So dungeons/fractals/raids don’t work for those people. I’m one of them.

…….

The people who have the most problems with HoT tend to be guldless without people who run that content with them. They avoid grouping and they’re not necessarily very good at playing their characters.

Hi Vayne

In the first part you are saying that are plenty of people that are not fond of grouping to play Raid/Fractals/Dungeons – fair enough.

But in a later fragment , you are saying that the people that find HOT difficult are the people that also avoid grouping (also bad at their characters).

Not sure you are consistent with your conclusions.

Anyway, for me an expansion is targeted to all the people interested in the game, not a minority that likes their difficulty in the open maps. And speaking of difficulty, even after I ‘got good’ playing my char those maps were still frustrating to move through. I spent most of my time in the Auric Basin – the tamest of those zones, that also has a nice city hub.

I don’t think being alert 100% of a game session is healthy for a MMO or for the people playing it

I also expect the next expansion to not have the same level of open world annoyance so we can get back at an enjoyable exploration. Hopefully I’m not wrong…

Well, if someone is finding something difficult that others find quite easy, then they either have bad machines, bad internet connection or not as much skill. That’s the only conclusion I can come to.

I’m not the worlds best player. I’m not a raider. I don’t use meta builds. I’m living in Australia, so my ping often sucks, but I’m still doing fine in HoT maps. I’m also an older guy with shoulder and neck and back problems. I’m even colorbind. I still do fine.

Seems to me with all the disadvantages I have, HoT should be hard for me, but the truth is, it’s not. It did take a bit to get used to it, but I think the problem is people just hate dying, They think they should never die in a game, or they should die hardly ever. But dying is what teaches you how to play better.

Some people feel if they die they’ve lost. This is probably a holdover from older games, where you couldn’t save your progress and had to get to the next checkpoint or start over I hated that too.

Death is Guild Wars 2 just isn’t that costly. I think people would rather give up than learn to play their profession better.

AliamRationem.5172:

Ashivan.5216:

Vayne.8563:

Clearly that won’t work for everyone but there were plenty of players who were bored with how easy the open world is that aren’t particularly found of either instances or grouping. So dungeons/fractals/raids don’t work for those people. I’m one of them.

…….

The people who have the most problems with HoT tend to be guldless without people who run that content with them. They avoid grouping and they’re not necessarily very good at playing their characters.

Hi Vayne

In the first part you are saying that are plenty of people that are not fond of grouping to play Raid/Fractals/Dungeons – fair enough.

But in a later fragment , you are saying that the people that find HOT difficult are the people that also avoid grouping (also bad at their characters).

Not sure you are consistent with your conclusions.

Anyway, for me an expansion is targeted to all the people interested in the game, not a minority that likes their difficulty in the open maps. And speaking of difficulty, even after I ‘got good’ playing my char those maps were still frustrating to move through. I spent most of my time in the Auric Basin – the tamest of those zones, that also has a nice city hub.

I don’t think being alert 100% of a game session is healthy for a MMO or for the people playing it

I also expect the next expansion to not have the same level of open world annoyance so we can get back at an enjoyable exploration. Hopefully I’m not wrong…

While Auric Basin obviously has the least layered/complex layout of any HoT map, the enemies you face are significantly more difficult as are the events. I may be misunderstanding you, but you seem to be suggesting that the other maps have you on high alert all the time while AB doesn’t?

I’ve seen similar opinions numerous times and I’ve always found it confusing. I understand why players who dislike complex layouts prefer AB to TD/VB, but I really don’t understand why some players seem to believe that AB is somehow more solo friendly.

All the maps are solo friendly to me.

Legendary gives you no stat advantage over ascended. Ascended does give you an advantage but not as much of an advantage as you probably think. Mostly like you’re dying because people have better builds and more practice at using them.

I recently kicked someone from my guild for making homophobic comments in the guild discord chat. I don’t tolerate that kitten and never will. However, I don’t feel an overwhelming need to say my guild is LGBT friendly, though I have no problem with other guilds saying it.

There are simply a lot of people who live in alternate live styles who never know where abuse might come from. Saying you won’t be abused here isn’t a bad thing as far as I’m concerned.

And since it’s not breaking any rules I don’t know why we need a post bashing the practice.

Dashingsteel.3410:

Moral of the story…… Always take what Anet says with a grain of salt

Real moral of the story: If you’re going to play an MMO expect things to change over time. I find it extremely unreasonable to expect that five years after someone says something to believe the situation will not have changed, sometimes significantly.

Buffs work in adventures including speed boosts if you have one.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

DiogoSilva.7089:

Grinding the best DPS stat sets available whenever a new expansion comes is, for all intents and purposes, pretty much a less exciting and more convoluted version of the classic gear treadmill from other MMORPGs.

First, there isn’t any need for the vast majority of people to worry about changing stats: zerker and its variations will continue to be good/great for power builds sinister/viper and their variations will continue to be good/great for condi.

Second, people who speed clear or want to be “first” in completing new, challenging group content will always find a ‘need’ to get the latest “best” DPS builds, but even then, then can replace runes/sigils and stat swap their gear. There are only a handful of stats that require anything more than coin.

So gear-grind in GW2 is something that a minority of players impose upon themselves.

Progression in this game (after reaching L80 and maxing masteries) is much more about improving as a player and less about changing your skills/build or gear.

Not to mention it’s fairly cheap/easy to change your stats on aascended armor and weapons.

Not going to change. And if it did, I would absolutely leave the game. Many of us came here to get away from gear treadmills. When ascended gear was introduced you should have seen the kittenstorm on the forums.

Many people left at that time because they assumed more tiers of gear would come into the game and that’s not why we play this game.

If your friends want gear grind there’’s plenty of games out there…pretty much every MMO. Let’s have one that the rest of us can play.

If I’d wanted gear grind I’d have become a watchmaker.

Torolan.5816:

Vayne.8563:

An MMO company is not a person. People say all sorts of things all the time and mean them when they say them. Time passes and what was once true is no longer true. Colin was the game director and under his watch, that never came back….but MO never said it, and may have never even thought it.

People say Anet said something but it’s never true, because Anet has no mouth. It has 300 mouths. What someone says is only good as long as management doesn’t change, and even then circumstances can change.

I remember when Anet said an expansion wasn’t in the works and the Living Story was going to be the way forward. I always remember telling us that eye color wasn’t important enough to include in character generation and that walking would never been in the game, only running. All those things changed.

Town clothes changed too. They felt something didn’t work and they changed it.

At the end of the day, Anet doesn’t say anything ever. Individual developers say something and very likely mean it when they say it. Nothing is law or set in stone, because circumstances change. Hell in real life even laws change.

Sometimes it sucks when it happens, but this is one instance where I’m in favor of the change.

This attitude would be the quickest way to the closest conyon for the largest majority of companies. It would be like:
“Well, the developer said so to sell stuff and because he meant it because we promised him so. But screw him, we do what we want as a company.”
Not only is this massively cynical, it would make all involved people look like dorks. so either gag the developers or put out only serious information about the product.

If said developer makes such a statement on reddit or another inofficial forum, it is nearly excusable and makes just the company look like fools because the left hand has no idea what the right hand does. But if this happens on Gamescon or anything resembling a PR event, it is a sign of a trigerhappy management who either bit more that they could stomach or just made a false advertisement.

Actually this isn’t true, because MMOs aren’t like most products. MMOs are services. You’re not paying for a program, you’re paying for access to a world. That’s how it works.

I have had favorite rides at Disneyworld that have closed. It happens. Things change over time.

Most games dont’ have an over time, or at least didn’t. When I buy a driving game two years later, it’s pretty much the same game. Maybe some new tracks or new cars, but the game doesn’t fundamentally change. This isn’t true of MMOs and anyone that’s played a lot of MMOs would know this.

I can think of tons of reasons why something would change from what someone said. If I ran a health spa and I said I was going to put in a new machine and you were interested in it, but no one else used it, I’d take it out, even if it kittened you off. Because there’s limited room in the spa, and the machine wasn’t getting use. That’s probably why the Twilight Arbor forward/up path was replaced. Not enough people running it.

At the end of the day, an MMO is an ongoing thing, a world that changes. Have you looked at the difference between WoW when it launched and WoW now? Or Rift? Or SWTOR, or Age of Conan, or TSW, or Lotro or DDO, or Star Trek Online? They’re all vastly different games. And stuff any company says can change over a period of years.

That statement made by Colin was made five years ago. But this is true in the business world too. Once you see under new management sign anywhere, changes can happen. A new CEO takes over a corporation and that company can move in a new direction. It happens all the time.

Not sure how wise it is to put your faith in two paragraphs from a forum post from a single person in an ever changing world.

Moyayuki.3619:

Going to chime in here again: I have been working on the newest LS chapters and finally got through the Ember Bay bit. Boy, oh boy…the Mursaat fortress literally did have 20 Veterans ganking up on me! The rest of the map was pretty tame, with only the occasional Vet here-and-there to add a challenge…but pretty much every single Jade Armor (I forget the name of those enemies), packed into a small area, was a Veteran.

This therefore means that the OP’s original statement isn’t exaggeration, though I will admit that many enemies in the original HoT maps (Verdant Brink to Dragon’s Stand) hit like they are Vets.

I’ve played the mursaat fortress probably more times than most, since I’ve completed that zone and story on more than 30 characters. I’m not sure it’s possible to get 20 of those vets to attack you. I can tell you where they all patrol and how long their leashes are. If I tried, I probably couldn’t round up 20 of them, even if it feels like that to you.

There may be an area or two where you can get 8. Of course that would assume that you’re not killing as you go and you run into stuff training a bunch of guys with you.

I seriously doubt you ever counted 20. I’ll test it and see if I can get 20 vets beating on me, but I find it highly unlikely.

Ashivan.5216:

It’s weird – I never thought of HOT maps as end game content but just new maps/content for all players to explore with the new expansion. End game content for me could be Raids/Fractals/Dungeons.

When you release an expansion you do it mostly to attract new players or convince the older ones to come back. The ones that are playing are still there… playing. So in this regard I can’t agree with the end game content remark.

Anyway, for me the main issue with the difficulty in HOT was that it’s in the wrong game genre. Maybe I’m wrong but I’ll try to explain it.

MMOs are usually huge time sinks, played in larger game sessions with frequent breaks, interrupts or just not being fully present to what’s happening on the screen. I usually attend to various other things while playing a MMO.

The HOT maps are just a mess in this regard – the enemies in there only need a couple of seconds in which you weren’t on your toes to kill you. This coupled with the annoying map layout (how the hell do I get to that point?!), mob density and their annoying CC skills meant it was a frustrating experience overall. I didn’t really explored Tangled Depths because of that and I avoid it at all costs.

Just my 2 cents.

Guild Wars 1 had Eye of the North, the only true expansion for the game (other releases were all stand alone games) and Anet did the same thing. Eye of the North was harder by far than anything else in the “open world” in the vanilla games. There’s a reason why, though.

At the time you get to that content, everyone is max level. That is to say, everyone is there with 40 zones of easier content, and virtually no open world end game content. At least of of the things an expansion should so is expand this game. This could mean just in area, but Anet took it to mean in the options you have.

Because this isn’t another MMO and people can still go back and play old zones, it made sense for them to add to the menu, give people something else to choose.

Clearly that won’t work for everyone but there were plenty of players who were bored with how easy the open world is that aren’t particularly found of either instances or grouping. So dungeons/fractals/raids don’t work for those people. I’m one of them.

The stuff that bothers you about HoT is the stuff that makes HOT repeatable for me. There’s a reason to go back to those zones. To get better at them. To learn them. To figure out better ways through them. To deal with them. To help me learn the game better, without going into instances.

An MMO needs to have lots of content for lots of different players. I believe there are enough people like me to justify a harder expansion.

Anet did return to the expansion and make a few things easier and give more to solo players by way of events with vets instead of champs, but I’m glad they didn’t nerf it entirely.

The people who have the most problems with HoT tend to be guldless without people who run that content with them. They avoid grouping and they’re not necessarily very good at playing their characters.

Anet has in the past tried to introduce harder content into the open world, and every time they do, there are complaints. This isn’t some new thing Anet has suddenly done. It’s something they’ve been gearing up to all along. Southsun is harder than Orr. Silverwastes and Dry Top are more complex and harder. The game has been moving in this direction because some of us need something to sink our teeth into.

For years there were forum threads ridiculing how easy the game was. Those have largely stopped because those people who enjoy harder content are finally satisfied.

The different I think is that some people who aren’t as good at the game can get better. There’s not much for better players who want open world content to do other than HoT.

An MMO company is not a person. People say all sorts of things all the time and mean them when they say them. Time passes and what was once true is no longer true. Colin was the game director and under his watch, that never came back….but MO never said it, and may have never even thought it.

People say Anet said something but it’s never true, because Anet has no mouth. It has 300 mouths. What someone says is only good as long as management doesn’t change, and even then circumstances can change.

I remember when Anet said an expansion wasn’t in the works and the Living Story was going to be the way forward. I always remember telling us that eye color wasn’t important enough to include in character generation and that walking would never been in the game, only running. All those things changed.

Town clothes changed too. They felt something didn’t work and they changed it.

At the end of the day, Anet doesn’t say anything ever. Individual developers say something and very likely mean it when they say it. Nothing is law or set in stone, because circumstances change. Hell in real life even laws change.

Sometimes it sucks when it happens, but this is one instance where I’m in favor of the change.

As for the first question, those NPCs should have been right where you were when the story ended, at the bottom of the spire. Speaking to them isn’t crucial to understanding what’s going on though. Just some extra flavor.

Raids do indeed give some part of the story but there’s also a character in story that recaps what happens, though in only the most cursory manner

Sorry I don’t remember being told that wasn’t going to happen. Not saying your wrong, but it strikes me as the kind of thing Anet virtually never says. If they did say that, I’d love to see a quote.

All I usually see them saying is stuff like we have no plans of bringing them back at this time.

Dashingsteel.3410:

I agree Vayne…….. My original post in this thread was calling out an often overused trope in these forums….. you know the one…… it goes something like this…… “People who don’t like HoT hang out on the forums and complain while people who enjoy HoT are too busy playing the game to make posts”

It is a squirrelly way to claim that the pro HoT faction has greater numbers….

This is why I made these posts. To call out the ridiculousness of claiming to know which side has the greater numbers….

The point is more people are known to complain than compliment as a thumb rule. The reason people make those posts is because the critics are so loud and often contain within their posts things that are either factually wrong, or completely unprovable.

You’ve never seen me make a post about how great HoT is. I will refute posts that suggest that HoT is a failure or HoT can’t be soloed, or no one does HoT or Dragon Stand, or whatever.

Still plenty of people in those zones doing metas, pretty much every time they come up.

The hardest one to get is VB not because it’s hard to get, but because t he reward is largeliy meaningless to most people. I already have all three bladed coat boxes, I have no reason to do it again, except to help others…which I don’t mind doing.

Also VB is the hardest of all the metas to understand because it not only lacks clarity but the change from how it originally worked throws a lot of people off.

Djinn.9245:

IndigoSundown.5419:

MMO’s survive by using reward systems to foster content repetition. ANet has been adamant about keeping the raid rewards exclusive. So, what rewards would be put into story mode to foster the type of repetition we see in normal raids? Without such rewards, a story mode would be a waste of resources by a company that has in the past struggled to put out content on a regular enough basis to retain all of its player base.

WoW LFR works because of welfare epics. Also, that game is heavily dependent on raids as the be-all and end-all of their endgame. Raids in GW2 are a tiny part of the endgame pursuits available.

Some time ago an Anet raid dev commented in the dungeon subforum that they were looking at ways to make the lore bits (and I do mean bits) in raids available to non-raiders. For those of you who want access to that lore, why not wait and see what they come up with?

Cause we also need to complete raid masteries…

More normal rewards. Zone currencies. Tokens for anything. There are plenty of rewards that could be added. The point is most people dont’ repeat sotry mode dungeons but those are in the game. And the personal story, all 50 chapters of it, aren’t repeatable at all.

There’s precedent to create a story mode, particularly because most of the design work is already done. They don’t have to recreate the raids themselves.

Feanor.2358:

Vayne.8563:

I consider this to be one of the biggest issues with the game. I’ve spoken out about it before, but clearly the powers that be don’t care very much that people don’t have access to the story all the way through. It’s bad enough you can’t play Season 1, but the connecting stories that lead from HoT to Season 3 should have been playable by everyone.

I’m not saying everyone needs to have rewards for doing it. I’m saying we need to be able to experience that in game as our characters.

This genre is called mmoRPG. Seems like some people at Anet don’t really focus very much on the RPG part.

I know I like my characters to be motivated to do stuff. So much so that I’ve finished the personal story on 17 characters.

A raid story mode shouldn’t even have been a question. It should have been a given…in my opinion.

I don’t think many MMORPGs put that much effort in the RPG part. Let’s be honest, the writing in GW2 doesn’t live up to good RPG standards. Take joining the Shining Blade as an example. It was rushed and pretty illogical, even for my human noble character. Imagine what’s like for an asura or a charr. So… while I generally agree and would like more actual role-playing, I don’t think it’s happening in this particular game and I don’t see hypothetical “story mode raids” contributing at all to it.

That’s why I don’t play many MMOs. I like the story in this one though.

Dashingsteel.3410:

My whole point was that there is not a majority view on either side. Nobody knows the numbers unless one has the telepathic ability to read everyone’s mind who has ever played HoT.

Which has been my point all along. I’ve never claimed to have a majority. But other people who make claims that Colin left because HoT failed, or that even HoT failed, that’s just someone not liking the game projecting.

I think we can agree that hot wasn’t a wild runaway success. It also wasn’t likely a failure. You should take some time and really read some of the posts complaining about HoT or how so many left because of it. No one knows how many people left or how many restarted playing because of HOT, or raids or anything else.

Dashingsteel.3410:

Game director leaves after HoT….. Massive patch in spring of 2016 to Hot in attempt to coax players back into HoT maps….. Mike O’Brien delivers a new mission statement assuring the community that gw2 is back on track…………. “We’ve learned our lesson from HoT”(cryptic statement from shareholders meeting)

I know what conclusions I draw.

See we both draw our own conclusions about “numbers” but it doesn’t prove anything.

The op enjoyed it and that is the crux of the thread.

Game director left for Amazon and a much higher salary since they opened up down the block from Anet and they hired away 12 top people some before HoT launched even. You can tell he wasn’t let go or fired because after it was announced that he was leaving he still participated in reddit AMA,s something you don’t let people who are being fired do. Colin wasn’t fired, therefore his departure from Anet has nothing to do with HOT.

MO said directly that the problem wasn’t people who played. it was people who were free to play players not upgrading to HoT. That’s a direct quote.

Therefore, it’s likely that the very loud complaining voices which I don’t believe were ever any kind of majority turned people away from buying HoT, which IS a problem. Anet made changes to HOT to make it so that more people would see the changes, because the changes really ween’t that massive. Map design didn’t change. Individual power of creature generally didn’t change. Virutallyl all the hero points that were champs are still champs. They changed two if I’m not mistaken.

And they added some veteran events in without really taking away much of anything else.

In a couple of areas they thinned out some mobs. It was relatively small as far as changes in difficulty. But the bad publicity from some very loud voices, sure that does affect sales.

Evidence, people on these forums who posted they held off getting hot for a long time due to the forums only to find it was fun and wasn’t as bad as people said

The fan base is a big part of the reason people didn’t upgrade from free. Which doesn’t make it any kind of majority view

Actually though there are a lot of little hidden nooks and crannies in Lake Doric that I found reminscant of more intersting maps. Still it’s my least favorite map of the Living Story.

In the beginning the Marionette fight was awesome. Toward the end, when the players that new the fight had moved on mostly and had gotten the achievements, it wasn’t as awesome. As much as I enjoyed the fight the first time, it doesn’t belong in the game now.

One of the main reasons the fight was popular was the farming the lanes during the defense phase, which dropped random “key” pieces you could use the open the chests in Scarlet’s lair. Without that, it wouldn’t have been nearly as popular.

Those rewards have long be superceded by other rewards in the game.

It was a good fight. But I don’t believe bringing it back would make the game better long term.

I consider this to be one of the biggest issues with the game. I’ve spoken out about it before, but clearly the powers that be don’t care very much that people don’t have access to the story all the way through. It’s bad enough you can’t play Season 1, but the connecting stories that lead from HoT to Season 3 should have been playable by everyone.

I’m not saying everyone needs to have rewards for doing it. I’m saying we need to be able to experience that in game as our characters.

This genre is called mmoRPG. Seems like some people at Anet don’t really focus very much on the RPG part.

I know I like my characters to be motivated to do stuff. So much so that I’ve finished the personal story on 17 characters.

A raid story mode shouldn’t even have been a question. It should have been a given…in my opinion.

Djinn.9245:

Vayne.8563:

But mae it really easy for me, so I can be heroic in my turn.

I think you should re-read – I have read that people want to experience it, not that they want to be heroic.

Plus it isn’t heroic to single-handedly slay a dragon, it’s just stupid.

I’m not single handedly slaying a dragon. I’m inside the dragon’s mind, while an entire army (mentioned in the story itself) is outside fighting it’s body.

Yes, being inside the mind is heroic. It’s almost like a version of Frodo tryng to destroy the ring, while Aragorn and Faramir and company are outside the gates of Mordor distracting Sauron, keeping it’s attention on them. If it was good enough for Tolkien it should be good enough for Guild Wars 2.

Or have you not done Dragon Stand?

It’s true that sometimes I feel really bad for the people I’m fighting. Not often, but sometimes. lol

dagrdagaz.4913:

Zoltreez.6435:

Vayne.8563:

Where as I loved HoT maps and they saved the game for me It was too easy before. It seems like the playerbase is quite split about if HoT was good or not. I expect a mix of content going forward.

there is a difference betwin something being Annoying or Hard….

Difficulty is not realy an issue for players… people love challenges…
but if the ONLY difficulty is that its being annoying as hell then thats trash…

and hot maps are nothing else then annoying…

I do not love challenges, and difficulty CAN be an issue for me.

I play GW2 to have fun, be entertained and pass time.
I do not (want to) play GW2 to be challenged, be annoyed or waste time.

I’m in the same boat as you. I simply don’t find HoT maps that challenging. I just have to actually pay attention. I don’t see value in running around zones that I can beat with any build, predominantly using my 1 skill. It doesn’t make me feel heroic. I don’t feel like I’m in a war zone.

I complete VB and AB to relax before bed.

Dashingsteel.3410:

@Sigfodr…… How is it that you made it to the forum?? I thought you would be busy enjoying the game.

The spurious claims as to the numbers that like/dislike HoT seem to never stop on this forum . Claiming to have “numbers” on your side is a weak argument. Nobody has the numbers(as it would be impossible to know).

Op, even though I dislike much of HoT I am glad that your experience was a positive one.

This has nothing to do with the forum. This has to do with human nature. I’ve been in business for a good portion of my life. I’ve run successful businesses on more than one occasion. Complaints always drastically outnumber good feedback, even thought the percentage of complaints we got was tiny.

No one says no one who likes the game will talk, But from long experience we know people who are dissatisfied are more likely to voice their annoyance than people who are satisfied. It’s always been like this, and every single management seminar I’ve ever been to stresses this.

Saying that this forum would be significantly different from the norm would be different makes no sense, unless you have some compelling evidence to suggest otherwise.

If HoT was so disliked and such a dismal failure, the sales figures for the game wouldn’t have stayed basically the same through the first year of HoT. They only feel after a fairly long content drought.

And most threads have about 50/50 as far as people who liked and people who don’t, or at least, that was true for the longest time. I’ve counted the posts in many threads, and it’s always been about 50/50.

And given that we know that more people complain than compliment pretty much is a given,… I know what conclusion I’d draw from that.

A lot of it has to do with Australian law. Blame your government, not Anet. You know, the Turnbull guy. lol

Healix.5819:

GW2’s difficulty is fairly unrealistic… when compared to other MMOs.

Most MMOs balance their solo content for the majority, making the difficulty similar to Queensdale. Any difficulty is usually faked using vertical progression, where you simply need to obtain better gear to go back to trivializing the content. GW2 however was always intended to be more challenging, as ArenaNet has always been for the gamers, but the problem with continuously increasing the difficulty without an alternative is that they’ll lose players because of it. GW2 does offer an alternative however, which is grouping, but the problem with that is that most people want to play solo.

Because ArenaNet already allows groups to trivialize the content, there’s no reason not to make it easier for everyone. The simple solution is to make it easier depending on how many times you’ve died, such as giving you a 10% damage reduction every 3 deaths. Then they could do achievements for not dying solo.

Okay I really like this idea. This allows those of us who are better to get something and those of us who can’t do it to at least complete the story. I can definitely see benefit in this.

I’m pretty sure underwater weapons are on a list of things to do, after the other things they’re doing. Anet is spending a lot of resources making an expansion, introducing mounts. My guess would be that the amount of work it would take to redo underwater content is prohibitive and would deserve a large patch all it’s own. It’ll get done when it comes up in the queue. It’s just not that high a priority

TheUndefined.1720:

Vayne.8563:

See this to me is where the disconnect comes in. OP hasn’t played the game for years, comes back and expects to jump into end game content and do well immediately.

Many who have been here all along, didn’t find HOT as difficult. Didn’t have problems soloing the stories. Taking years off and jumping into end game content should be hard, and HOT was always meant to be end game content.

Other than that, I thought it a fair review, so good job OP.

Hey there,

Thanks for the response! I just wanted to touch on this, the fact I haven’t been playing for years is the whole reason why I wanted to make this review. I want to give a different perspective than those that have stayed playing throughout this time. I’m a returning customer. I think this perspective offers insight into how ANet could tune / market to customers who fell off out of the loop and introduce them to the game more smoothly.

Maybe the first two zones should be easy then ramp up in difficulty? Maybe there should be a couple different starting zones (one for newbies another for veterans)? Maybe they could scale up or scale down armor accordingly to put everyone on the same footing for a certain time limit? Are these good suggestions? No clue!

In either case, I posted that it could be my bad gear, I could suck, etc. This was just my personal experience that it seemed really excessive. I’m glad to hear that wasn’t the case for the veteran players, tho!

Just a quick note, despite difficulty, I was really impressed with how helpful and generally kind map chat was. If I had a problem and asked, 9/10xs I would get not only information but help. So despite the difficulty and the fact I honestly didn’t enjoy myself for a bit, the community really jumped in and made it a better experience.

Thanks again!

I don’t know that I agree with this. I’d been playing for years and I didn’t pay for 2 end game maps and 4 easy maps.

The problem is Living Story Season 2, Drytop and the Silverwastes are all interim content that you probably didn’t play. So what you did was go from 6th great to 9th grade and found it hard. Well yeah, sure, I’d find that hard too.

That doesn’t mean the game should be made easier. It means the game should teach better. Really there should be a warning on HOT saying this is meant to be end game content and you really need to know your class well in order to conquer this area. There will be deaths, but if you perservere you can learn your way through this dangerous war zone.

HoT worked for me because it was a war zone and it was dangerous. If that didn’t happen for two maps, I’d have been disappointed.

Obtena.7952:

Mil.3562:

Obtena.7952:

20 veteran gank? What game are you playing?

I believe what OP meant is that the game story difficulty is liked being ganked by 20 veterans, so do not take those words literally.

Tbh, sometimes I felt the same too, dying over and over again, till I gave up, hoping maybe I will have better luck next time IF I try again.

I know many here are GW or MMO elitists who spent thousands of hours over the years playing games. So to you guys nothing in the game is difficult.

Um, I think that’s not really an accurate statement. Definitely people felt the step up in difficultly that HoT delivered. It’s simply a question of how you deal with it. I’m willing to say without a doubt that if you have a grasp of the defensive tools and traits a class possesses, along with a basic understanding of the stats gear gives and what the weapon skills do, most if not all of the open world part of HoT, including story, can be soloed.

In otherwords, this isn’t about experience playing MMO’s, it’s about solving problems that RPG’s have been providing players since the beginning of the genre, even before they were on computers.

In addition to this, knowing your enemy and what to kill first is very important. Focus on stuff you can’t kite, that does high damage, most of that stuff dies pretty quickly.

See this to me is where the disconnect comes in. OP hasn’t played the game for years, comes back and expects to jump into end game content and do well immediately.

Many who have been here all along, didn’t find HOT as difficult. Didn’t have problems soloing the stories. Taking years off and jumping into end game content should be hard, and HOT was always meant to be end game content.

Other than that, I thought it a fair review, so good job OP.

kurfu.5623:

Vayne.8563:

Essence Snow.3194:

kurfu.5623:

Whatever you happen to save on WP costs will be offset by the fact that you have to spend money to collect your loot.

Could you elaborate on this please? How would we need to spend money to collect loot?

Not quite accurate. You’ll need to spend money to identify some of your loot. Some of the loot that drops in PoF drops as identified gear. The idea is to have more stack so your inventory doesn’t run out of room as fast. But you still get normal drops that aren’t like that.

There’s a charge in silver to identify unidentified gear, should you choose to do so. If not you can simply salvage it for mats.

The thing is you might get a rare or even an exotic from that gear, if you identify it. If you don’t you’re just salvaging greens, and missing out in a possible rare. It’s a choice.

It’s probably a gold sink to replace the fact that we’ll be waypointing less.

Having to spend money to collect loot you’ve earned is a terrible idea.

But you’re not spending money to collect loot. You can salvage the unided greens without identifying them at all and keep all that mats.

I’m a guild leader. 400 people in my guild now. Pretty active. Very happy. I don’t care if people rep and NEVER have.

If your guild is worth joining, and being a part of, people who feel at home there will want to be a part of it. Why would I want people who don’t feel at home there to a part of it. They won’t add to the guild.

Guilds are a service. I don’t own people and they owe me nothing. So I start a guild and attract like minded people and we have over 100 people logging in each and every week. People repping most of the time.

Enough people to get stuff done. Enough friends to play with. Why would I try to force someone to rep my guild.

As a side comment, I belonged to multiple guilds in WOW and Rift too, just on different characters. Here at least it’s in the open.

While I can do this fight pretty much at will now, I disliked the penalty box idea immensely. The fight in general left a lot to be desired At very least it needs more checkpoints and the penalty box should have been a temporary thing, not standing there waiting for the rest of the fight.

This game, in general is more processor intensive than it is video card intensive, so the processor is likely the bottleneck.

I’ve also found intel processors work better than AMD processors, at least that was true for me.

Beyond that the only lag I tend to get, or more technically latency, is because I live in Australia.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

On one hand, we can argue that we did the content to get the Mastery points, so why not you.

However on the other hand it was easier to get those points with everyone doing them at the same time, including guilds actively helping guildies out with current content. It’s easiet to get help and someone to play along with when content is fresh than when it’s a couple of years or more old. Now players are going solo through old content and trying to round up people to help out with the harder bits.

It’s one of the faults of the mastery system that playing old, abandoned content is required for current character progression. ANet might need to look at a system to help out new or returned players to progress mastery tracks based on old content. If enough hit a stopping place where they have to solo play long stretches of old, abandoned content then they might stop completely.

I would argue it’s easier to get most mastery points now, because more people know content. There may not be more people running AB or TD, say, but then, AB and TD fail a lot less often than they used to.

wrathmagik.3518:

Necrossis.6318:

So I played only a little into heart of thorns, But Path of Fire looks pretty sweet and I would like to come back. With experience that you currently have would it be logical to come back and not really play through Heart of THorns and go straight to Path of fire? Thanks for any input.

Don’t play HOT, its probably one of the wort expansions i’ve ever seen for an MMO. It almost single handidly killed GW2.

Half the community hated it so much they basically gave up on the game until the next expansion and thus why POF is nothing like the Titanic disaster that was HOT.

I didn’t kill Guild Wars 2, because Guild Wars 2 is still very much alive. And some of us, including me, think HoT is the best part of this game.

Telling someone not to play HoT based on your own personal tastes is sort of silly. Maybe he’s like more challenging open world content, more complex maps, more interesting meta events.

HoT revitalized this game for me. Without it I might not be playing myself.

Twyn.7320:

Vayne.8563:

Sounds to me that your conclusion is stating your own opinion as what “people” are feeling. Well I’ve played a lot of MMOs, and I’ve heard about every one of them the same I’m bored mantra by a percentage of the playerbase.

The events work because they are tied to rewards that require you to do them. If you don’t go for any of those rewards, you’ll have less impetus to do them.

I’m working on HoT legenday weapons so I’ll need HoT currency. In fact, I also use HoT currency to lower my karma cost for obsidian shards. That means I’ll be spending a lot of time in HoT maps.

And I’m not bored with the events the way they are.

Making events more rewarding generally would do nothing but increase inflation. Sure everyone wants more rewards. But that doesn’t make more rewards necessarily good for the game.

As for the ‘claiming my opinion is a percentage of the player-base’, my opinion is fuelled by the countless people across many guilds that I’m in who regularly drop out because there’s nothing to do, outside of maybe 3-4 PvP matches a day, and a WvW hour long zerg.

If you’re not bored, that’s fine. But there’s examples in GW2 of long-lasting content, and The Silverwastes is one of those things, that’s still regularly played even now.

Same as every MMO in existence. WoW once had 12.4 million people, dropped down to 4 million So at least 8 million people left (maybe more since new people would have started). Everyone is bored of every MMO all the time. People come here from other MMOs and say I’m bored of this game or that game. Happens all the time.

The thing is, most games don’t have dynamic events at all, they have static quests and static quests are one offs. They’re not meant to be the thing you do over and over again at max level.

Saying you’re bored, your friends are bored, your guild is bored is nothing if it’s said in every single MMO across the bored. It’s a meaningless comment.

MMOs are all about having goals. Most MMOs predefine your goals for you, this one lets you choose your own goals. I prefer that to being told to farm this dungeon or this raid waiting for this specific piece of gear to drop.

Your mileage may vary.

Dailies take me less than ten minutes on most days, sometimes much less. Not sure how meaningful you want them to feel.

Djinn.9245:

atheria.2837:

Dante.1763:

I…i want to know what bosses you are having trouble with?

The only one ive so far needed help with is the final battle with mordremoth due to their stupid prison idea which i kittening hate. Im also running a full vipers/sinister, so i have no defense. Theyve also nerfed them a bit already, both the core story(which has been nerfed really hard) and HoT.

There is only one toon I’ve been able to go from beginning to end with little help but I still needed help at the end.

Other than that one toon, there’s no way I can do most of it without help. LFG is a joke for this kind of thing so one ends up begging in maps – I’ve done it and I’ve helped dozens and dozens who have no one else to play with either and would have preferred to finish the story ‘alone’ to feel accomplished, but nooooooo.

Yep, it shouldn’t be so hard to participate in the GW2 Story.

People who answer this type of thread that “Anet can’t keep making the game easier” – I’m not sure that anyone in these threads is asking for the entire game to be easier. What I see, and what I personally wish, is that the STORY bosses were easier. I play GW2 for the story and it boggles my mind that Anet, who goes to the trouble of creating this rich story, is OK with a large percentage of their players never fully experiencing it.

Yep, I’m absolutely talking about the story which is one of the main reaasons I play any game.

If the story is faceroll (and in many cases if you made it easy enough for some people complaining, it would be too easy for me), means that I couldn’t take the story seriously and I was lose my reason to play the game. Or at least my main reason. I want to feel challenged by what I’m doing because if beating a boss is dead easy then there’s no real purpose to it.

The only thing I can think of that would solve the problem is having some sort of easy mode that provides the story with no achievements or options of trying to get those achievements.

What people are saying in other posts is I want to do this myself and be heroic. But mae it really easy for me, so I can be heroic in my turn. Of course, the easier it is for those people the less heroic I would feel.

Sounds to me that your conclusion is stating your own opinion as what “people” are feeling. Well I’ve played a lot of MMOs, and I’ve heard about every one of them the same I’m bored mantra by a percentage of the playerbase.

The events work because they are tied to rewards that require you to do them. If you don’t go for any of those rewards, you’ll have less impetus to do them.

I’m working on HoT legenday weapons so I’ll need HoT currency. In fact, I also use HoT currency to lower my karma cost for obsidian shards. That means I’ll be spending a lot of time in HoT maps.

And I’m not bored with the events the way they are.

Making events more rewarding generally would do nothing but increase inflation. Sure everyone wants more rewards. But that doesn’t make more rewards necessarily good for the game.

Hybarf Tics.2048:

Anet’s list of forbidden topic:
Underwater combat
Skimpy Armors
Housing, did I forget anything?
All these 3 topics have been shelved and archived for the past 5 years, why do players still think things are gonna change? Anet does not get involved in theses topics, like… forever.

Yet this is what people said about mounts. Hmmmm.

Mel.3064:

Vayne.8563:

Try the desert borderlands one it’s easier.

Desert borderland seems harder to me, gave up on that after an hour of trying. The alpine was I was able to cheese with dragonhunter F2. Too bad you need the cats from both maps if you want them to fight in your home instance.

I watched a video, got the alpine on the third or fourth try.

Fractals have replaced dungeons as the five man instanced content. There are new fractals and many of the older ones have been redone.

There’s also skin collecting and achievement point hunting for us casuals.

maddoctor.2738:

kdaddy.5431:

which isnt the case for what seems to be alot of the GW2 community since the selling rate of HOT was really really low.

What does the difficulty of HoT zones have to do with HoT sales? Those who complain about the difficulty of HoT already bought it.

I wouldn’t call the sales of HoT “really really low”, do you have something to back that up? Someone officially claiming that the game indeed sold really low? Because the lack of revenue after the release of HoT can also be attributed to the core game going free to play and not being good enough to increase the sales of the expansion. And that conversion of free players into paid customers was indeed confirmed as one of the causes for the reduction in revenue, while the sales of HoT weren’t.

PoF already did something good, it is much better priced than HoT, so it’s likely to attract more customers for that fact alone.

Actually the difficulty could affect sales. If you have a lot of people complaining about it, casuals might not buy it even if they would be able to deal with it. That’s what I keep saying. Half the problem is the bad publicity but I don’t think the dislike of hot is as wide spread as people seem to think.

Try posting some of the stuff you see here on reddit and you’ll see how faster the community downvotes it.

Try the desert borderlands one it’s easier.

kdaddy.5431:

Vayne.8563:

kdaddy.5431:

Vayne.8563:

Zoltreez.6435:

Vayne.8563:

Where as I loved HoT maps and they saved the game for me It was too easy before. It seems like the playerbase is quite split about if HoT was good or not. I expect a mix of content going forward.

there is a difference betwin something being Annoying or Hard….

Difficulty is not realy an issue for players… people love challenges…
but if the ONLY difficulty is that its being annoying as hell then thats trash…

and hot maps are nothing else then annoying…

There’s a difference between an opinion and a fact. YOU found them annoying. I didn’t find them annoying. Ergo they are annoying to you and not to me.

The HoT maps I found interesting. I now find some of the core Tyria maps to be rather dull.

But you know, it’s a matter of opinion, and that’s all it is.

You are right it is opinion.

But the OP said he was a PvP player. If he was a good one he would find HOT simply annoying.

In S5 of PvP i got to PLat 2 and ended in Plat 1 just 40 or so points away from a top 250 spot.

Alot of the PvP players i knew, ran threw raids. Simply adjusted PvE builds to finish the content quickly without fail. I mean 2 of them carried me threw a Xera run with 5 people.

So to point out, HOT wasnt challenging content for alot of players it was simply annoying.

This goes for everyone, the reason many people like me think it failed was because it simply ruined many aspects of the game.

HOT killed the PvP scene with GW2 losing ESL as well as ESL teams quiting 2 minutes into a match because the meta and HOT specs were just so bad. WvW had the same effect with 50 man zergs insta dying from the speed of which combat had changed without a way of fighting back.

Then you get to PvE where Anet failed in putting this " hard " content in certain areas. For instance when GW 2 first came out Orr was a difficult area to play in, the great argument was it was suppose to be. And there were 16+ other maps you could farm, explore, find JP, kill bosses in. They eventually nerfed Orr ( wasnt not a fan of that) and to me there was no reason to.

HOT comes out and no it wasnt hard but having to wait for a meta map timer in 3 maps and then having to coordinate bosses and completing events. They eventually came out with maps for the casual PvE crowd. They were not appealing to the X % of the player base while ruining PvP and WvW of the other player bases.

HOT unlike core GW2 did not give a little to everyone but simply gave to a certain player base which was coordinated PvE.

So of course there is more threads about HOT being annoying since HOT brought alot in one area and killed off others.

I know people who PvP and WvW all the time who don’t do well in HoT content. Being a PvP player doesn’t give you some special secret powers to be good at everything . Just saying.

More to the point,j one of the guys in my guild is most a WvW player, plays a ton of PvP and didn’t find HoT annoying at all. He enjoys it as a break from PvP and WvW.

You can’t paint everyone with one brush. It’s still an opinion and you can’t even know that you have some sort of majority there. It changes nothing I said

See this is my point, you never take into accounts what anyone is saying.

Alot of people are saying they do not like it and you always counter argu with well i like it and my friends like it.

You never take into account the facts such as Anet having to combine 3-4 servers together for WvW when before HOT they didnt have combine any servers.

Or the fact that players where in the 1800 for ratings for PvP and then it was high 16XX because alot of players left.

We wont take that into consideration or the fact Anet kept saying " going back to basics" when bringing out that POF trailer.

Im happy for you and your friends and glad you love the game as much as you too. Yet you jump on the forums and defend it without ever really saying much other then " i can do it, my guild members do it and therefore its not a issue " which isnt the case for what seems to be alot of the GW2 community since the selling rate of HOT was really really low.

But i guess we will see when POF comes out.

You never take into account that the number of people saying they don’t like it seem to be about equal to the number of people who say they do, and the amount of people complaining is virtually always greater than they number of people defending.

You also don’t seem to take into account that before those server reassignments, there were tiers of WvW that were so dead, they might not have existed at all….long before HoT. People used to complain about them quite frequently.

The solution had always been to transfer to a busier server, leaving those servers deader and deader. But again this was all going on long before HoT.

The problem isn’t that I’m saying I like it and lots of people like it, since I didn’t make a thread saying that. I’m responding to a thread where other people are claiming other things.

My response is a counterpoint to claims made by others. I’m not starting my own threads about how great HoT is. I’m simply expressing my opinion that things aren’t so black and white, and with good reason.

We’ve seen on this very forum that people had avoided buying hot for long periods of time only to find out they like it and it’s fun. They avoided buying it because of posts on those forums that painted it as hard, or frustrating or what have you.

It doesn’t matter if you agree or not. I’m perfectly entitled to post on these forums a counterpoint to what’s being said, so people reading a thread that will stay on the front page for weeks on end at least gives both sides of the story.

Housing was never promised. Not once. Not ever. It was mentioned. Once. In an answer on guild wars 2 guru by Martin Kerstein who only said it wouldnt’ be in the game at launch and that it would probably be added to the game with the first expansion with guild halls.

That really doesn’t qualify as a promise.

I really wish people would stop using hyperbole to try to make points because it weakens any argument they might have.