I started playing GW2 for the first time at the beginning of July. A good friend told me about it and she even bought the HoT Ultimate Edition with me so we could level up characters together. I loved it right away and have had a great time playing through the story quest, the daily events, the crafting, etc. Not one time did I ever feel that playing this game was a sub-par experience until now. The Heart of Thorns Beta has left me scratching my head wondering why the overall experience was so bad. While I could comment on many of the topics already posted I will focus on the one I noticed the most.
The difficulty of the enemies I faced in HoT versus the ones in the base game is what I am referring to. I had a fully leveled and geared Ele when I created my beta character and he went down in just about every fight. That is not fun nor does it challenge me since the some of these enemies were basically steroid induced fruit bats. I did not see any point to making enemies this difficult and it really turned off both me and my friend who has played this game much longer than I have. There did not seem to be any reason for the difficulty of the enemies either. I suppose if you just want to tag this expansion as “for larger groups only” then feel free to but I would probably just play through the rest of the GW2 base game and then leave since it does not leave room for 2-4 person groups. Each element of the game needs to come together to create something that makes for at least a good overall experience for the gamer. In my case, if this were the first time playing this game I would have switched back to ESO or Tera. If this development team plans on keeping things at this difficulty I will say that I’ve just wasted money on getting this expansion.
So to sum this up, this is my complaint: the difficulty of taking down enemies while in a 2 person group was too hard and the re-spawn rate was too high. I like the current difficulty I encounter in GW2 because my character feels like a hero. He can take down the common enemies with little effort but gets a challenge when encountering a higher level veteran or same level champion just like a comic book hero or some character in an action movie. In HoT I was repeatedly taken out by vines popping out of the ground, stupid bats in a frog village, and over powered enemies of all sorts. I could not progress in the story line cause I was too busy fighting enemies with every 3rd step I took. I stopped playing the Beta on Saturday after one event that took a good 20-25 minutes to complete and that was with a relatively good group of people fighting along side us. Please tell me that this difficulty is not going to be what comes when this goes live.
