The Guild Wars 2 Thread

[Stokowski]

After the the character graphics changes:

 

[CrimsonAngel]

I have the biggest back pack ever they better dam prioritize it.

 

[Nikaido]

Arenanet kind of screwed themselves with their manifesto. I thought that ascended gear was a good way to add endgame progression without going full treadmill, but the butthurt it caused was absolutely insane.

Dude, they add more progression without any content that could even possibly justify any sort of progression. That's about the most retarded thing a MMO could do.
Not even fractals need the ascended gear. I used to do 48+ runs on very low AR, low enough that any agony meant one shot death but since you can dodge pretty much everything apart from the Maw level agony that "gear gate" isn't even really a gear gate to speak of.
All that new gear does is cause potential imbalance in WvWvW where differences in stats can actually matter more than in the faceroll PVE.

In most MMO progression sort of serves a purpose, and content supports it. In Guild Wars 2, you introduce new progression (now the ascended weapons) while enforcing the play of some of your worst content (world bosses and orr temples are now mandatory to any player who wants the best in slot gear, because of the dragonite. World bosses and orr temples are the dumbest shit I've seen in a MMO, zerg events you have to hunt through timers and then put your brain in a jar and press 111111 until it ends.) for the acquisition of said gear.

It was okay when gear acquisition meant going through actual content like Fractals of the Mists in my opinion, but the moment you coerce people into doing stupid shit like world bosses is the moment I lose all interest in your game.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

I liked how they totally overhyped their "dynamic events" pre-release, and they turned out to be just Zerged up versions of ordinary public quests with a minor difference between activations based on whether or not a horde of players was nearby.

EDIT: Then again they overhyped everything, and it was really only just their own word that there was anything 'innovative' in GW2.

 

[Zewp]

They didn't really have to hype anything. Their moronic players did enough of that for them. Even today their more rabid fans keep going on about how GW2 revolutionized the MMO genre, while it didn't really revolutionize jack shit.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

I distinctly remember the dynamic event video they made when they started the media blitz.

EDIT: And yea, it's rather funny how the fans talked about how GW2 has gameplay never seen before, or does totally new things. My only comment was that I'd already seen all this stuff in Champions Online and DC Universe Online, except done a shitload better.

The only innovation in GW2 is a new pinnacle of making leveling up boring, and how to make all classes bland to play as.

 

[Kane]

No item progression = dead game, no matter how much anti-WoW nerds protest. Are they still playing? No. When will MMORPG developers learn that casual bullshit design only works for 6 hour singleplayer blockbusters.

Item progression itself is casual bullshit design.

 

[Nikaido]

I liked how they totally overhyped their "dynamic events" pre-release, and they turned out to be just Zerged up versions of ordinary public quests with a minor difference between activations based on whether or not a horde of players was nearby.

Pretty much everything except for dungeons in this game = zerguing shit. If you are the type who used to get cancer from grouping with baddies in other mmo just think about what it feels to be in a zerg that scales event up while nobody in said zerg understands really simple, basic mechanics and fail incredibly simple things like the Temple of Grenth. Looking at how the average gw2 player has a broken dodge key they wouldn't even get past a single Dark Souls boss.

I honestly don't know how this game could possibly survive without more serious instanced content. And the player base literally gives you cancer. The open world can suck my dick if it means playing with retards, which is like 99% of the gw2 player base.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

It's not even just that the open quests suck ass and generally the gameworld is grindtastic (I didn't mind this since for a while it was fun to explore new zones, heck the XP I enjoyed the most was just the platformer and exploration XP, since the combat is so hopelessly mediocre in GW2), it's that the sense of progression is killed at around the half-way point of leveling through. You literally hit a point where you stop growing more powerful and get less and less out of each level.

 

[Nikaido]

It's not even just that the open quests suck ass and generally the gameworld is grindtastic (I didn't mind this since for a while it was fun to explore new zones, heck the XP I enjoyed the most was just the platformer and exploration XP, since the combat is so hopelessly mediocre in GW2), it's that the sense of progression is killed at around the half-way point of leveling through. You literally hit a point where you stop growing more powerful and get less and less out of each level.

When I read the beginning of your sentence I thought you were going to mention the lack of actual end game beside the 8 dungeons +fractals.. but you're complaining about the levelling process? It takes ~1 week to get your first character to lvl 80. The process could be the most boring thing ever and it wouldn't matter, once you're 80, you're 80, what matters is the end game and this game has none.

Some of the dungeons can be fun to do and having speedclear groups to do them and trying to find new strategies to shave off minutes are all fun activities, but there's only 8 dungeons and they're all pretty short except for Arah path 4 and SE Path 2. And this is pretty much the only content along with fotm worth doing at lvl 80 in PVE.
They're all rather simplistic and lack advanced mechanics to figure out. It doesn't exactly take a genius to understand that this game is nothing more than 5 dps players doing full dps rotation as fast as possible on everything.

 

[Stereotypical Villain]

BUT SURELY THEY'LL FIX IT IN AN EXPANSION! Wo- won't they? You'll see! You'll believe that a baby Charr can fly!!! MARK BLAKEMORE MY WORDS!

 

[Black_Willow]

Well, I'm still having fun in wvw, doing a dungeon or fractals from time to time. Still better than any other "new" MMO.

 

[Average Manatee]

It's not even just that the open quests suck ass and generally the gameworld is grindtastic (I didn't mind this since for a while it was fun to explore new zones, heck the XP I enjoyed the most was just the platformer and exploration XP, since the combat is so hopelessly mediocre in GW2), it's that the sense of progression is killed at around the half-way point of leveling through. You literally hit a point where you stop growing more powerful and get less and less out of each level.

When I read the beginning of your sentence I thought you were going to mention the lack of actual end game beside the 8 dungeons +fractals.. but you're complaining about the levelling process? It takes ~1 week to get your first character to lvl 80. The process could be the most boring thing ever and it wouldn't matter, once you're 80, you're 80, what matters is the end game and this game has none.

Some of the dungeons can be fun to do and having speedclear groups to do them and trying to find new strategies to shave off minutes are all fun activities, but there's only 8 dungeons and they're all pretty short except for Arah path 4 and SE Path 2. And this is pretty much the only content along with fotm worth doing at lvl 80 in PVE.
They're all rather simplistic and lack advanced mechanics to figure out. It doesn't exactly take a genius to understand that this game is nothing more than 5 dps players doing full dps rotation as fast as possible on everything.

Anyone who thinks it's worthwhile to spend a week (and it's more than a week unless you are a hopeless mmotard with no life) playing knee deep in shit just so they can grind end level content needs to die.

 

[Night Goat]

It takes ~1 week to get your first character to lvl 80. The process could be the most boring thing ever and it wouldn't matter, once you're 80, you're 80, what matters is the end game and this game has none.

If it took you a week to hit 80, you've got way too much free time.

I'm not still playing Guild Wars 2, but I definitely got my money's worth. It's true that there's not much of an endgame, but the endgame in other MMOs consists of running a gear treadmill ad infinitum, and I say fuck that; I've got better things to do than waste all my time in a Skinner box.

 

[Nikaido]

It takes ~1 week to get your first character to lvl 80. The process could be the most boring thing ever and it wouldn't matter, once you're 80, you're 80, what matters is the end game and this game has none.

If it took you a week to hit 80, you've got way too much free time.

I'm not still playing Guild Wars 2, but I definitely got my money's worth. It's true that there's not much of an endgame, but the endgame in other MMOs consists of running a gear treadmill ad infinitum, and I say fuck that; I've got better things to do than waste all my time in a Skinner box.

To level an 80 quickly just grind dynamic events and waypoint from one place to the other. You don't need to be a nolife to get to 80 in one week but you do need to be willing to spend 100% of your in game time grinding rather than looking at pretty flowers while "exploring". Instead of exploring everything or whatever just look at the main dynamic events and grind them. They are the thing that gives you the most xp-for-time-spent, basically a lot better than any other in game activity. Don't do anything but that, and when you outlvl an area just go straight toward the best events / meta events on the next, don't explore anything else. Don't do events that take too much time (like escort events).

As for the other mmos end game, I agree that the gear treadmills suck but they do have, gasp, actual content, with raids, and dungeon bosses that have actual mechanics unlike gw2. As dumbed down as WoW currently is compared to its early days, its boss mechanics are still 100x more developed than gw2. GW2 barely has two bosses with "phase" concepts, Lupicus and the Grawl Shaman. And the first one can be killed in under a minute with a melee party and a mesmer because this game allows you to negate a whole mechanic (the phase 2 attacks/AoE) at the press of a button (feedback). GW2 is playskool's my-first-mmo. The fact that a vast majority of random groups still fail at dungeons like arah is a testament to the stupidity of the player base. If you look at the EU gw2lfg there are ton of people selling slots for arah paths, and they do that because there's actually enough people willing to spend gold on that shit. What?

I found the idea that there'd be a game without gear treadmill attractive but the fact is, gw2 isn't only treadmill-free, it's content-free. It doesn't have content worth doing.

 

[Night Goat]

To level an 80 quickly just grind dynamic events and waypoint from one place to the other. You don't need to be a nolife to get to 80 in one week but you do need to be willing to spend 100% of your in game time grinding rather than looking at pretty flowers while "exploring". Instead of exploring everything or whatever just look at the main dynamic events and grind them. They are the thing that gives you the most xp-for-time-spent, basically a lot better than any other in game activity. Don't do anything but that, and when you outlvl an area just go straight toward the best events / meta events on the next, don't explore anything else. Don't do events that take too much time (like escort events).

Why would you do this? It isn't a race to level 80, and getting there is most of the fun.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

To level an 80 quickly just grind dynamic events and waypoint from one place to the other. You don't need to be a nolife to get to 80 in one week but you do need to be willing to spend 100% of your in game time grinding rather than looking at pretty flowers while "exploring". Instead of exploring everything or whatever just look at the main dynamic events and grind them. They are the thing that gives you the most xp-for-time-spent, basically a lot better than any other in game activity. Don't do anything but that, and when you outlvl an area just go straight toward the best events / meta events on the next, don't explore anything else. Don't do events that take too much time (like escort events).

Why would you do this? It isn't a race to level 80, and getting there is most of the fun.

Except it stops being fun around half-way through when you don't get anything cool anymore or have anything to look forward to in terms of mechanics.

 

[Night Goat]

Speak for yourself, I enjoyed it until I got to Orr (which admittedly sucks).

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

The gist is that in GW2 you just don't feel like you've got anything going for you, or any kind of sense of speciality. Their method of ditching the Holy Trinity was just by making every class bland. Another effect is that you stop feeling like you're increasing in power at the half-way point.

And of course, there's the fact the combat is nothing new to MMOs, and doesn't do anything better than the ones with same style that came before.

GW2 was a steaming turd with glitter sprinkled on it. It might look pretty at times, but it still smells and tastes like shit.

 

[Average Manatee]

Even if you are magically achieving a .5 hours per level rate (.75-1 hour per level is much more likely), that's 40 hours to gain 80 levels. If you are playing 40 hours in a single week you are by definition a no-life.

Also what the others said.

 

[Zewp]

tl;dr this game just fucking sucks.

 

[Black_Willow]

tl;dr this game just fucking sucks.

lol no
At least wvw doesn't.

 

[Zewp]

If you like just following zergs and just spamming DPS rotations then I guess WVW can be fun.

If you actually like having fun, then you won't have fun.

 

[Black_Willow]

If you play wvw like this then have fun dying or l2p.

 

[Nikaido]

tl;dr this game just fucking sucks.

lol no
At least wvw doesn't.

I guess you can find wvwvw entertaining if you never played Dark Age of Camelot. Because that's basically a very watered down version of the Realm vs Realm from DAoC. Utter shit compared to what it tried to copy.