The Guild Wars 2 Thread

[Mastermind]

All I'm saying is that in these kinds of games, I like to feel my character getting stronger and have cool/better equipment and that kind of stuff to strive for. GW1 didn't do this very well if you ask me, since you hit the max level and got the best stuff when you were less than 1/4 through the content. I actually didn't even purchase the expansions because playing more content without feeling like my character is getting any stronger isn't appealing to me. The main appeal of these kinds of games is getting better loot and skills so you can kill tougher monsters and get better loot and skills.

This was intentional. They wanted the game to be more about player skill than grinding. And you do get stronger, by acquiring new skills (I still don't have a ton of elites I wanted in GW1 since I got bored with the game). The entire game's complexity revolves around combining skills in ingenious ways and the more skills you have the more combinations you can use. Didn't look like GW2 has much of that left anymore, though I haven't tried the pvp.

 

[Hoaxmetal]

This weekend I managed to get to level 31, and I can tell you: things start to get seriously better after level 20.
First and foremost: opponents get stronger. Veterans are so much more common. Champions are a regular deal here. You need to use crowd control on them, or you will die. Sure: you can still solo them, but it will require more timing and hand-eye coordination than anything I've ever played before (except for shooters, but that's different). Dodging is now a requirement. Not dodging final blows will usually get you down, and if you manage to survive it, the condition it applied is going to get you down anyway. To me, it felt like level 1 - 20 were a tutorial (even though the motto is: the endgame is everywhere).
Secondly: traits start to kick in, combo fields get important. This was a huge deal for me, as I noticed how to properly use my combo fields. It hadn't occurred to me that, as an Elementalist with staff, I could make a huge impact on what kind of buffs people received. For example: just putting an electrical field in front of the boss would easily get him around ten stacks of vulnerability (especially when you are with a large amount of people). Add a firewall to that (giving burning to projectiles and might to other finishers), and the outgoing damage of your group increases severely.
On top of this come traits. The points alone make a huge difference in the way your character plays. I played with power and precision (as many have, I'm sure) and the effects on your power and critical chance are awesome! It really gave me that "glass cannon" feel, and because I didn't have any points in a defensive stat, it made movement and dodging a lot more important.

Sounds good.

 

[Ulminati]

What hoax quoted. Coordinated GW2 >= coordinated GW1. But GW1 has been out for years and 99% of the GW2 testers weren't in the closed betas and are still at the Zerging stage

 

[Hoaxmetal]

The main appeal of these kinds of games is getting better loot and skills so you can kill tougher monsters and get better loot and skills.

Adjusting your party build to complete a challenge > grind for certain item level to complete a challenge. I felt pretty big increase in character power when I adjusted my gear/skills for the task ahead.

If all you want to do in MMO is grind for xp and gear then there's the 95% other mmos for you I can't be arsed anymore to play mmo for some time only to return a few months later with my gear beng useless and with a new grind ahead of me.

 

[SuicideBunny]

GW2 on the other hand is just WOW without a monthly fee and better art direction.

to me it felt as if gw2 is gw1 without the ability to go to pvx and download the current -way team build that lets you instawin nearly everything while afking. it's hardly noticeable with all the retards running around and just spamming skills for no better reason than to spam skills, but when you're the last person in overflow and have the opportunity to try soloing the event bosses, you notice how fucking awesome the combat system actually is.

 

[SerratedBiz]

I guess I'll be with the haters on this one. What I feared back before the beta started was at least partially proven true during this beta weekend.

Of course, I'm sure I missed the full potential of GW2's gameplay. People speak of coordinated play and I'm sure that highly skilled players in highly coordinated teams will always defeat lesser ones.

However:

1) The game lends itself all too easily to playing solo. During regular PvE it's obvious why, and might even seem encouraged - given that "quest" progress is not shared between groups and the pack of monsters design mentality of yore has been replaced with the wandering solo monsters approach of WoWlikes. During dynamic events it's very likely you'll be playing with others, yes, but it's to each their own. As long as you make a breathing effort to evade boss attacks and keep yourself from actively dying, you'll be just fine spamming your skills to get your gold contribution and be done with it. Maybe revive a teammate for some exp.

In PvP, and again this is based on my limited experience playing in Vent / TS groups, coordination seems to amount to making sure you have enough firepower at one point in time to overpower your opponent's. Of course player skill plays a big part in such a thing, and a good player can often beat two poorer ones by correct use of their build. Still, most encounters can be beaten if you make sure you and someone else are focusing on the right opponent, spike damage being sort of a regular occurrence in PvP as opposed to something certain builds focused in back in the day.

2) Skills. I don't know if this is the face of what we're getting at release, but I find it fucking boring. You can pretty much unlock all of your weapon skills before you're level 5, and then you're stuck with those and only those for the rest of the game. Utility skills, on the other hand, are limited to some 30? skills whose usage has been dumbed down from an energy system in favor of a cooldown one. What were they thinking? How do they design a Thief around the basis of Initiative but other classes purely based on CD timers?

The weapon skill system also does a disservice to itself in that, past certain thresholds, you're better off foregoing trying out different weapons until you've bought / found an up-to-date version of the weapon. By necessity of money and luck, you're more likely to find a combination you like and keep to it instead of updating the rest of your weapons to see if they are more effective in your current context. This, of course, doesn't apply to PvP.

What was easily the most complex and rewarding system of GW1 was replaced by a distillation which made me bored of playing my character past a few hours.

That said, GW2 has plenty of good points and it still overcomes WoW in terms of design. It's been made to be faster to explore, faster to access utilities (mail, auction house, travel system), faster to quest and made it possible to participate in events just by being around when they happen, which is all sorts of cool. Some of the larger events easily match up to dungeons in terms of scale, difficulty and time - and at least once the reward (a chest) also seemed to imply that was the purpose behind their design. The combo system seems to be something which will take time to master but which will also further differentiate the really good players from the just good - though I can't be sure of this, since my only combo kills seemed to be very accidental.

What I look forward to seeing: dungeons (which I couldn't be arsed to lvl to 30 to go to Ascalon, not sure if there were others) to see what actual teamwork PvE feels like; other PvP alternatives with bigger maps but more focused gameplay (ie, not WvW but GvG), ANet making the game run off my GPU instead of my CPU.

 

[fizzelopeguss]

Warriors are disgusting, and need nuking from orbit.

Camera's floaty, and i fucking loathe a floaty camera.

the game's art direction is a disjointed mess, probably the most surprising thing considering all the pr bullshit in their trailers. The animation is really solid though and saves it from total disaster.

The claims that the combat are some miraculous revolution for MMO's turned out to be complete bollocks as per usual.

PVP was a fuckfest, i'm guessing it's limited to 2-3 maps for the beta? Unfortunately didn't get to try out WvW because of some queue shenanigans.

That being said there's likely enough content here to justify a £35 quid purchase.

 

[Black]

I don't know what to think any more, help me Codex

 

[made]

It's better than Diablo 3, which you bought, so you should be all over this. They even have their own RMAH scheme for the likes of you. :trollface:

Likewise for poster below, who also bought D3. At full price.

 

[Stabwound]

I don't know what to think either. If it was a monthly fee game I wouldn't even consider it. If I caught it during the $45 sale I probably would have grabbed it, but I'm not sure about full price. Especially considering the microtransactions and frequent DLCs that are sure to be released. Even GW1 had intended to release a new expansion every 6 months, although that didn't end up happening.

I think ArenaNET will ultimately start pumping out DLC content packs at a rate in which you're basically paying equivalent to a monthly fee if you purchase them all. Again, that was actually the intended business model of GW1.

 

[Black]

It's better than D3, which you bought, so you should be all over this. They even have their own RMAH scheme for the likes of you. :trollface:

I honestly can't tell if it's better. People are saying that it gets better at level 20-30 which I didn't achieve so I don't know about that, though in most cases the "it gets better later" excuse is plain bullshit.

I played only this beta weekend, I picked human thief and it just so happened that human starting areas as well as human thief storyline are boring as fuck and terribly written. Honest to god, bioware quality shit right there. I'd be willing to roll a charr instead but I don't see why any of the races having shit areas and story should be acceptable.
Then I smacked shadow behemoth in the swamp with other zerglings and it was plain boring and schematic. First he summons 3 shadow realm portals which you have to destroy, then when he's making more portals he's vulnerable so you can damage him during that time. All that while dodging very easily dodge-able aoe attacks. At the end, a huge chest with nothing useful inside. I "raided" that boss around 3-4 times, all raids looked the same. There were no siege weapons to use on him, no caravans, no nothing. Just him and us, the swarm.

I've seen that there are "more complex" boss fights, like against the Shatterer, but I haven't gotten so far so I'm, yet again, forced to believe that maybe eventually things will get better.
Next thing, pvp, which I only tried world v world pvp, was a huge clusterfuck. One team of zergs against other team of zergs.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S69rgaSicMM
That was pretty much it. And once again my class choice fucked me over, because I, as a thief, shouldn't be standing in the middle of a huge clusterfuck, I should be picking off targets one by one, hit and run. Near 0 fps didn't help.
So, here we go again, there is the possibility that pvp will get better once people learn to play and zerging won't be the only strategy. But there's also possibility that it won't and that even GW1 random arena will easily surpass GW2's pvp in terms of skill and diversity.

All in all, it doesn't even seem like me being negative and other people being positive is just about having different opinions. It's as if we've played different games. They keep saying it's "revolutionary", that pve is good (except that I picked wrong area and/or didn't get far enough), that pvp is more strategic and amazing. And that there's a huge build diversity but, once again, you have to be far enough into the game to appreciate it.

So, either it really gets better and I'm too blind/stupid to see and appreciate it, or someone is fucking lying.

 

[fizzelopeguss]

It's better than Diablo 3,

not really, Diablo 3 is all about zit popping monsters, in terms of how the combat feels, it's easily up there with the best. And thinking about it if GWII they threw out its shitty weapon swap mechanic and adopted Diablo 3's skill system we might actually get somewhere.

which you bought, so you should be all over this.

Why would i? they're completely different games and genre, MMO's are a dime a dozen that you can't take a piss without tripping over one. They're even letting you play the fuckers for free these days.

They even have their own RMAH scheme for the likes of you. :trollface:

Can you sell shit on it? that's my only use for RMAH's. This is a genuine question, you've awoken my inner yid.

 

[Palikka]

Is it possible to edit the interface like in GW1?

 

[Berekän]

I think you just can change the size of it, I didn't fiddle with it too much so don't take my word for it.

 

[made]

they're completely different games and genre

The games are actually quite alike on many levels. I'm surprised I have to explain this. Where they differ is also where GW2 pulls ahead. Huge open world that invites exploration vs. corridor levels, multiplayer gameplay that warrants the online req vs. SP DRM and 4 player co-op max, 10 hours of grind then start over on higher diff vs. potentially hundreds of hours of grind + events + pvp + WWW + instances for the same price... To D3's credit, its camera didn't suck (from what I've seen anyway).

Can you sell shit on it? that's my only use for RMAH's. This is a genuine question, you've awoken my inner yid.

You can trade gold for gems and vice versa. I'm not sure whether you can easily sell gems for RL cash but they said they were inspired by EVE's PLEX system so I imagine you can.

 

[Castanova]

This weekend I managed to get to level 31, and I can tell you: things start to get seriously better after level 20.

Sounds good.

Sounds like selection bias. Who would bother spending what must have been the entire weekend so they could get to level 31 in a beta (where your character is not permanent)?? Someone who, oh I don't know, kind of likes the game, maybe? Just the thought of spending enough time in this crapfest of a game to get to level 31 is giving me a headache.

 

[fizzelopeguss]

I don't know what to think either. If it was a monthly fee game I wouldn't even consider it. If I caught it during the $45 sale I probably would have grabbed it, but I'm not sure about full price. Especially considering the microtransactions and frequent DLCs that are sure to be released. Even GW1 had intended to release a new expansion every 6 months, although that didn't end up happening.

I think ArenaNET will ultimately start pumping out DLC content packs at a rate in which you're basically paying equivalent to a monthly fee if you purchase them all. Again, that was actually the intended business model of GW1.

It isn't particularly good at ANYTHING, the story and voice acting was straight from plucked from beelzebubs arse. If people thought diablo 3 was bad in those departments...well, they're about to reap the whirlwind in GWII.

Combat feels spastic and disjointed for a pc game, honestly i'd say the dodge-roll, weapon swapping would work far better on a gamepad.

The music is jeremy Soule-less at his worst.

The PQ's are a blessing and a curse, on one hand it's nice someone's trying to mix up MMO questing a little. But how is a gigantic blob zerg of particle effects and endlessly respawning enemies any better? The problem with PQ's is that when there's only one or two guys doing it they're fucking boring and a terrible chore, but when they start filling out...you start to feel like a spare prick in a gang bang, you're fighting other players for quest credit more than you are the monsters.

THAT BEING SAID...there's clearly alot of work that's gone into it, The fact that it's a jack of all trades mean there's something for everyone to sink their teeth into for a decent chunk of time. I did enjoy the crafting, and hope the later recipes will be a little more involved. The world seems genuinely massive and although i didn't get to try WvW i'm sure it's a lot of fun. i just hope it's not all lobby based.

The most fun i found though was the engineer being an hilarious class, luring retards into minefields/turrets and dropping mortars on dudes in pvp saved the beta for me.

 

[Black]

Is it possible to edit the interface like in GW1?

Nope, compared to GW1, interface editing is non-existent.

 

[Excidium]

You can move the map to the bottom or to the top of the screen and change its size or reduce the overall scale of everything, but that's it, I think. At least it has some cool functions, like unifying all inventory bags into a single one or showing all equippable items in the inventory on the left side of the character equipment screen.

I can't stand that stupid health globe, though. Why isn't it a bar on top of the weapon skills, with the enemy target frame over the utility skills instead of being on the top of the scren for no reason. First things I'd change if I could edit the UI.

 

[Excidium]

Also, why is XenForo so fucking terrible? I can't edit my post for some reason.

 

[Stabwound]

I can't help but think that everyone would lump this game in with turds like Kingdoms of Amalur if it wasn't an MMORPG. Really, I mean compare it to other recent non-MMORPG games. It's like a multiplayer Fable 3 or Divinity 2 or any other recent ARPG basically. For whatever reason the fact that it's an MMO game gives it bonus points. That counts for me too, though. I had fun with Diablo 3 mostly because I played it with other people, and really, the only reason I give any kind of shit about GW2 is because it's multiplayer.

I was hoping the beta weekend would help me decide if I want the game or not, but it didn't.

 

[Berekän]

ITT people seriously saying that Diablo 3 is better than Guild Wars 2.

 

[Black]

ITT people seriously saying that Diablo 3 is better than Guild Wars 2.

Glad you pasted your [Per] check.

 

[SuicideBunny]

I was hoping the beta weekend would help me decide if I want the game or not, but it didn't.

you already stated that it's not your type of game and that you dislike p. much everything about it, so why the uncertainty?

People are saying that it gets better at level 20-30 which I didn't achieve so I don't know about that, though in most cases the "it gets better later" excuse is plain bullshit.

i didn't reach 20, because what's the fucking point of playing a beta, but i can tell you that, as said above, the game does get significantly better with harder enemies, when you are forced to actually use your skills in a smart way and spamming 1 when downed will get you killed for sure instead of a sure res, which you can experience yourself if you manage to find a solo low level event (which i did experience myself), and what you yourself should have noticed if you paid any attention is that trash mobs do start increasing in difficulty somewhat noticeably around lvl 8/10, so the "it gets better at level 20" sounds like it could be right.

 

[made]

Well this BWE was noticeably easier than the last one, which wasn't particularly demanding itself. Chances are the final game will be tuned up a bit again. Or maybe not. It's supposed to appeal to casuals after all.

 

[Ulminati]

ITT people seriously saying that Diablo 3 is better than Guild Wars 2.

Glad you pasted your [Per] check.

ITT Black tries too hard. As usual.

 

[Angthoron]

I've a problem bros. GF played GW2 on this weekend and is seriously considering playing Asura as a main.

Halp plx

 

[SuicideBunny]

Or maybe not. It's supposed to appeal to casuals after all.

if gw1 is any indication, whenever they introduce something new it will start hardish and then get toned down to shit due to all the whiners (and completion statistics).