The Guild Wars 2 Thread

[Efe]

looks like you get everything, what is missing?

 

[Werdnicus]

For playable content, Living World mostly, personal instances where a majority of the story INBETWEEN expansions told. Capitalized because this is especially scummy, they paywalled content between game expansions so you are left in the dark regards major world events, characters, macguffins etc so you have no idea what the fuck is going on jumping into expansions enticing you to spend money on top what you already paid on the base game plus expansions so you don't miss out.

Obviously its not advertised but as a new player you have severely limited inventory space, bank space, character slots, build storage slots etc., just enough for your neurons to itch constantly and make you go "fuck I need to buy some more".

I've been playing for a three weeks now on and off, and by my calculations you have to spend almost the exact same amount you paid for vanilla + expacs just so you can play all content without any annoying restrictions on your account.

There is this cope that you can just spend in-game currency on gems (store currency) but I am convinced this is just a measure from Arenanet to save face since grinding gold is horribly tedious and the conversion rate is like buying swiss franks with african banana dollars, see:

Getting gold is not as easy as in other MMO's, vendoring items even at max level gets you 5 silvers at best.

If you want to give the game a shot, I recommend you play it as a free player (or maybe grab a discounted base game from g2a or something). There will be even more restrictions but it will give you a feel of the game pretty well.

 

[Drakortha]

Getting gold is not as easy as in other MMO's, vendoring items even at max level gets you 5 silvers at best.

If you are at Max Level and are trying to make gold by vendoring items, you're being a noob.

 

[Werdnicus]

Getting gold is not as easy as in other MMO's, vendoring items even at max level gets you 5 silvers at best.

If you are at Max Level and are trying to make gold by vendoring items, you're being a noob.

No, it was an example
havent maxed out any profs yet

 

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Farming for gold and/or gems ingame is an utter waste of time.

• 100 gems costs $1.25
• 1 gem = $0.0125
• Price of 100 gems bought with ingame gold has been sitting at around 30 gold for the past 3 months.
• 1 gem ($0.0125) costs 0.30 gold
• Silverwastes farm nets you about 8 gold per hour
• 8 gold = 27 gems ($0.33 if bought with IRL cash).

If you do the Silverwastes gold farm and make 8 gold per hour, you will make about 33ish cents in gems per hour. You are wasting the limited hours of your life grinding for imaginary pennies. Working a minimum wage job is 50 times more efficient, and you can actually spend that money on other things. If you are older than 15 and you want to buy stuff in GW2, it makes literally no sense to farm for gold ingame. Flipping burgers at McDonalds is orders of magnitude more efficient. For an hour of work at McDonalds, you could buy 1,200 gems (which can be turned into 250 gold). Even off-the books jobs for less than minimum wage, such as mowing the neighbor's lawn or dogwalking is going to be far more efficient. Farming gold ingame only might only make sense if you're 10 and your ignorant parents bought you GW2 for $50, but aren't willing to drop another $50 to buy you all of the content.

Buying all of the living world episodes costs 4,160 gems ($52). That would take you 520 hours of Silverwastes farming to buy them. With that time, you could have played and beaten 10 other games, built several model ships, written and selfpublished several books, and so on.

That's the insidious nature of MMO/gacha currencies. They're designed to obfuscate just how worthless your time is. It only becomes clear once you do the math.

 

[Caim]

That's the insidious nature of MMO/gacha currencies. They're designed to obfuscate just how worthless your time is. It only becomes clear once you do the math.

With the reveal that it takes about half a million dollars (yes, $500,000 USD) to max out in Diablo Immortal, I'm curious to see just how bad the numbers are there.

 

[Drakortha]

Holy hell. If you are comparing your time playing a game to flipping burgers at Mcdonalds and trying to Min/Max your time to currency ratio you are fucking autistic.





learn to play games and enjoy them, that is the whole point. you spastics.

 

[Lawson Ashurst]

Holy hell. If you are comparing your time playing a game to flipping burgers at Mcdonalds and trying to Min/Max your time to currency ratio you are fucking autistic.





learn to play games and enjoy them, that is the whole point. you spastics.

I'm Min Maxxing my Burger flipping build bro.

 

[luj1]

This was fun in beta before they destroyed it

 

[Werdnicus]

How do you miss the point so bad

 

[NoMoneyNoFameNoDame]

Holy hell. If you are comparing your time playing a game to flipping burgers at Mcdonalds and trying to Min/Max your time to currency ratio you are fucking autistic.





learn to play games and enjoy them, that is the whole point. you spastics.

I say what i'm about to say because I want to like the game.
I want to login, I want to stop wishing they would simply expand/remake GW1 instead.

FACT:
They inflated the currency value in this game by making it extraordinary "fucking autistic" how much time it takes to earn it.
That's the point that needs addressing even if the observation is itself ""fucking autistic".

FACT:
It may be my fault for not saving up the magic find boosters. As I simply expected they weren't necessary.


Anyhow if have to master large parts of the game to enjoy the game then your game is shit.

As a developer I hate to admit it but if your game doesn't get to the point sooner than later, then it's already wasting people's time.
That's right no matter how good the game gets you got to help people understand why they are going to invest in your game.
In this sense things like masteries serve to harm the game because you're saying fuck-you to the players making them wait longer.

What is the plot of GW2? I have no idea. It seems to be: there are dragons and shit, plus let's airbrush the history of GW1 away,
but also keep some familiar names cuz nostalgia.

For gameplay depth I think the devs built the game upside down on purpose. Which sucks. But the right-side up pyramid sucks too.
You don't want too much forced on the player. But the inverting the pyramid swings too far in the other direction.
At best the inverted pyramid lets casuals compete a little easier but we're way past that point in CURRENT YEAR.

Is GW2 good enough to forgive the letdown that the first 70 character levels are? I think not.
If you never played GW1 it may not matter to you since you're probably use to drawn-out purposeless slogs of other MMOs.
Indeed if you've never played GW1, GW2 can't help to trigger you to do the meme of pointing-off to the distance with your mouth wide open.

The game is just exponential cookie cut character customization, but due to the horizontal design it means jack shit to individual characters.
Characters are certainly able to be different from one another but not for reasons we have control.

It is often said Diversity Is Your Strength. Except unlike GW1 you can't recruit your own custom made characters to a personal team.
Which is a symptom of the decline a proper MMO brings.

Moving on..

If your game's primary reward for "hangin in there" and doing time-consuming tasks is new skins of the same old items: your game is shit.
Even GW1 itemization is shit when it comes to complexity and variety. But it was adequate for the experience when it launched and still
adequate for the intended experience now.
GW2 itemization is not adequate because as a proper MMO it's less meaningful to own anything in it.


I don't understand why the best rewards for high-level characters are all re-skins.
Is the pageantry aimed at demographics who appreciate having a closet full of clothing?
I guess that's kind of cool, but wtf i'm not wasting my life to put on a fashion show.

Btw Barbies live in a world where they get more variety to the luxury than item and clothing reskins.
Insofar as there are things to buy with gold that is more interesting then reskins, they require a shitload of investment of player time.
Yeah fuck that.


Now maybe if the skill system and the customization related to skills was GREAT I could just enjoy the game for the story.
Sadly they dumped GW1 approach and opted for Nintendo's Smash Bros design with a bunch meaningless icing in the form of buff/debuffs you have no control over.


Last but not least PvPers can get rekt.
Larping your way through scripted game-modes jerking off to microscopic pertubations in entropy has nothing to do with skill.
However PvP actually gives you a GOAL so for many that's when the game actually gets good.
Sad.

Conclusion:
If you want a more rpg-like candy crush then GW2 has you covered.
If you want a better rpg or a sequel to GW1, the empress has no clothes but she is easy on the eyes.

 

[Drakortha]

 

[Werdnicus]

It seems to me that your sunk cost fallacy of money and time spent on this game has somehow translated into you defending it tooth and nail against any form of criticism online

Posting videos and images is not an argument

 

[Drakortha]

It seems to me that your sunk cost fallacy of money and time spent on this game has somehow translated into you defending it tooth and nail against any form of criticism online

Posting videos and images is not an argument

If some of you spent half the time you spend breaking things down, and put that time into learning how to get better at the game, you wouldn't need to come to the forum to argue about anything, because you wouldn't be having a problem. But no, keep selling junk items to vendors and refuse to put effort in to get better. I'm not defending anything tooth and nail, I already agreed about living world being problem. But some of you are actually retarded and you need to be told.

You can teach someone to fish, but some of you don't want to learn. You just want the fish.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

gw2 sucks, play gw

 

[Drakortha]

gw2 sucks, play gw

GW2 is the perfect game, this was certified when Angry Joe reviewed it a 10/10 with a Badass Seal of Approval.

 

[d1r]

gw2 sucks, play gw

You're like 15 years too late to the party.

 

[El Presidente]

Both games are nice in their own way, GW1 is the better game but it's not even in the same genre as GW2. Also some people have rose tinted glasses when it comes to GW1, I was there from the first week onwards, if I remember my /age correctly I have around 6k hours of GW1 and that game always had issues, for one the first half of the Prophecies campaign is absolutely banal boring - though the pre-searing/post-searing thing was a very clever way to start the game, very memorable. But I really can't stomach one more second of post-searing Ascalon and Shiverpeaks, if I see those maps again I'll probably have a seizure.

On the other hand some of the newer maps in GW2 are some of the most fun you can have in a modern MMO by a wide margin. There's not even comparison, WoW and FFXIV's open world are a joke, ESO's open world manages to be even more bland than Oblivion's Cyrodiil. I didn't care to test New World so not sure about that but everyone seem to be saying that game flopped hard.

 

[El Presidente]

Point is if you want to play any kind of MMORPG for the open world content you might want to download UO Outlands or OSRS but you want specifically a modern theme-park MMORPG for the open world then Guild Wars 2 is the only worthwhile option available. Every other one is instance focused. WoW Shadowlands even manages to be instance focused AND suck at that, too. The scene is pretty grim to be honest, this genre sucks. Maybe Lost Ark is fun, I dunno.

You can still play GW1 by the way but the thrill of winning a HoH/HA (with a guild of humans) is long gone, team arenas are dead, random arenas are still a (small) thing I suppose. Main player hub is Kamadan which is pretty meh, I'd rather sit around Marketplace for example.

At this point Guild Wars 1 is a single player game, you play with your party of bots. It's still fun to theorycraft around but it doesn't feel the same.

 

[Drakortha]

Bough of Melandru is the one you want, comes with an extra infusion slot iirc.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Bough_of_Melandru

It's done.

 

[TedNugent]

On the one hand, you have to unlock dumb shit like bag space and pay for the wholly unnecessary living world content. On the other hand, there is only one gear treadmill for PvE and WvW, and you can literally do max level arena pvp with any class at level 2.

You don't even have to level toons if you don't want, they give you a level boost token with full exalted gear (which costs less than 100 gold for a cheap set anyway, or you can just get a set from the story) as part of purchase and they practically throw level tomes at you just from playing the game. It's almost completely lateral. If you don't want to play content, don't.

You don't really have to have any of the living world seasons.

The only thing you're buying is just more quests, world to do shit in and most qualified is the elite specs. But considering you can get 3 elite specs for every class for $50, a long with a shit ton of stuff to do, it's not exactly scalping.

I personally kind of enjoyed having more shit to do. I wouldn't bother with Heart of Thorns, Living World was skippable except for Icebrood which was okay, but kind of reminded me of WoW in a bad way.

I actually really think Path of Fire was the best content in terms of exploration, environment, set pieces and the actual story. Primarily because of Joko.

The death dragon quest in the base game actually wasn't bad.

I also understand getting the gryphon is a passion project and getting a skyscale is for lunatics with nothing better to do.

It's mostly just a theme park MMO. The thing that kept me playing was I actually enjoyed the action gameplay. But that's what I would really call it, a class-based action game with some choice on builds.

 

[Val the Moofia Boss]

I wouldn't bother with Heart of Thorns

I thought HoT was a good expansion. In fact, I'd that HoT is probably the best GW2 expansion. It has the best designed maps in the game with the verticality. It is very fun to traverse those maps. They are also the best designed maps in the game when it comes to replayability. 7 years later and the Auric Basin meta event is still packed, while the latest expansion's zones are empty. The mobs are actually challenging to fight, even after the nerfs. Not a braindead snooze like the mobs outside of HoT. Music wise, the expansion had some decent tracks. The story wasn't mindblowing, but it didn't overstay it's welcome and was quite fun. I'd liked bushwhacking through a living jungle, being chased by a giant spiderlady while carrying an egg that gave me superpowers, jumping into the mind of a dragon to kill his consciousness, etc.

Contrast that with PoF. Besides the story and mounts, PoF doesn't have that much going for it. The zones have neither the verticality nor the replayability of HoT. I suppose aesthetics are more of an opinion,on aesthetics, but when I play a fantasy game, I want to go to a fantasy world. I don't want to wander around a desert. I live in a desert in real life (Southern California). And then you have EoD, which doesn't even have a transformative feature like gliding or mounts. I think GW2 Cantha looks too sci fi, but it is at least visually imaginative.

Living World was skippable except for Icebrood which was okay, but kind of reminded me of WoW in a bad way.

How so?

The death dragon quest in the base game actually wasn't bad.

I think the problem with Zhaitan is that he's just "whatever". He has no presence in the story. His navy just wiped out some random island in an instance off the coast of Lion's Arch.. and then you pop back into the overworld and you don't see any navy or dark skies. Zhaitan himself wasn't even there when it happened. You forget that he is supposed to be a world ending threat. I don't find him interesting, and I don't have a personal investment in what happens to him.

Contrast Zhaitan with the later dragons:

• Mordremoth had a season of build up (wow, if he drove Scarlet crazy - the villain of season 1 crazy - just how scary is this guy? If Vinewrath - a minion of Mordremoth - is so powerful that he has a two hour long meta event that requires a hundred players to kill him, just how much more powerful is Mordremoth?), and him using telepathy to get inside people's heads and trying to turn them to him was pretty interesting. He also felt genuinely scary during the last 2 minutes of HoT's story when
  Spoiler

  he possessed Trahearne.
• Kralkatorik was the archnemesis of the gen 1 heroes, Destiny's Edge, and is Aurene's grandfather, so I at least had some personal investment in killing him (and that's not even touching on All or Nothing's ending). Plus, he was humongous and he destroyed a huge swath of Tyria, so huge that you see his path of destruction everytime you open up the world map. He felt like a big deal:

  

• Jormag felt like a retread of Mordremoth in that he/she/it/whatever was whispering to people, trying to manipulate them, but Jormag at least had a shred of charisma, plus some vulnerability in that Jormag felt that he wasn't powerful enough to defeat Primordus in combat and thus was trying to find a different way to defeat him.
• Primordus and the DSD were mystery boxes that kept people's imaginations running wild for a decade. People wondered if they were actually misunderstood dragons and would be friendly if only someone talked to them.

 

[TedNugent]

I thought HoT was a good expansion. In fact, I'd that HoT is probably the best GW2 expansion. It has the best designed maps in the game with the verticality. It is very fun to traverse those maps.

I disagree on both, but to each his own.

That canyon area in Path of Fire had the most fun traversal I personally felt. I actually had a blast just running through on the raptor/bunny/manta ray and dodging the undead mobs.

I found Heart of Thorns maps to be kind of painful to traverse but again, to each his own. I actually did Path of Fire first and got the bunny, not sure if that's what spoiled my enjoyment.

I think the problem with Zhaitan is that he's just "whatever". He has no presence in the story.

Eh, muh Tybalt tho.

How so?

In what way Icebrood reminded me of WoW?

It kind of reminded me of the orcs constantly being mind controlled/corrupted/turning evil or having internal intrigues and one scrappy good faction has to go up against the bigger, more martial component of their racial faction.

Bangar reminded me of Garrosh, the dragon corruption thing reminded me very much of the Old Gods. If I had just replaced "Blood Legion" with Kor'kron and orcs with Charr it would have looked like a typical WoW serial plot.

I guess I'm just fed up with that kind of material.

 

[Val the Moofia Boss]

In what way Icebrood reminded me of WoW?

It kind of reminded me of the orcs constantly being mind controlled/corrupted/turning evil or having internal intrigues and one scrappy good faction has to go up against the bigger, more martial component of their racial faction.

Bangar reminded me of Garrosh, the dragon corruption thing reminded me very much of the Old Gods. If I had just replaced "Blood Legion" with Kor'kron and orcs with Charr it would have looked like a typical WoW serial plot.

I guess I'm just fed up with that kind of material.

I like the Klingon archetype (viking samurai biker-gang conquerors), and I liked the Klingon civil war/reformation storyline from TNG/DS9 where they try to rediscover their roots and become truly honorable. So I like the Horde and the Charr and also liked the idea of the Horde civil war in MoP and the Charr civil war in GW2.

I think where WoW and GW2 screwed up was by 1. starting the series with the player playing as the humans defending against the invading savages (Warcraft 1 and 2, GW1 Prophecies), and then following that up with a sequel where you played as the bad guys. Playing as the bad guys in of itself isn't bad, but then you get 2. the historical revisionism, where the writers tried to sweep the deeds of the Orcs and the Charr under the rug and pretend that savages were the good guys all along and that it was actually the puny humans who were evil... for the crime of defending themselves from invading savages. It leaves a bad taste in the audience's mouth to see the people they first sympathized with demonized.

GW1 shows the fall of Ascalon in pretty grisly detail, with the kingdom being nuked, an invading army of beastmen committing genocide, taking children for slaves, eating prisoners, becoming the trigger for the destruction of a second human kingdom (Orr), and invading a third one (Kryta). But then you get to GW2 where the game actively tries to tell all that never happened, that the humans are the bad guys because they were squatting on the Charr's homeland, and the Ascalonians. In fact, there is a sidequest at Ebonhawke where you go knocking people's doors and killing them in front of their houses... just because they refuse to forgive the people who genocided their race.

 

[TedNugent]

That whitewashing is pretty braindead. I never touched GW1, I sorta regret it based on the feedback in this thread but realistically, usually when an MMO is past it's prime, it's over. That's one of the shitty things about online games.

Even in regards to WoW, vanilla private servers used to thrive, and then ActiBlizz had to take a slice of that pie.

Rather than letting people enjoy vanilla, which was fairly popular and robust at the time, they decided to do a hard reboot with BC Classic. It effectively destroyed vanilla. Good night, sweet prince.

Anyway, what got me about the whole good-guy/bad-guy thing in WoW was that they basically decided, alright. We read you loud and clear on the corruption thing being overplayed.

So what we're going to do is bring back classic good-guy/bad-guy faction trope.

And we're going to do it with that old clown everybody hated in Nagrand, Garrosh Hellscream, the moping cuckboy.

So, he found his balls, and he brings about classic Warcraft faction war. So far, so good.

Turns out, people hate Garrosh because he's basically an albatross with no charisma who is taking the train off the tracks. People still hated him for some reason, and they were begging for him to be killed off and for Thrall to take off his dress and come back.

So they decided to essentially beat you over the head with why you don't actually want to be the classic bad guy faction by turning them into orc-nazis and plunging themselves into a completely unnecessary fratricidal war based on orc supremacy ideology after kicking everyone else out and begging to get pasted.

That wasn't enough.

Then they said, okay, we read you guys loud and clear. What you actually wanted was classic Warcraft 2 orcs. So, we made a time traveling plot because we already made time walking a thing.

And we end up in a gee whiz repeat of Warcraft II! Wow, look at the box art, all these guys you liked, Grom Hellscream, Kilrog Deadeye, Bladefist, etc. And this time, they fuck Mannoroth's shit up and tell the demons to take a hike, they're doing this steampunk thing this time.

And all it boiled down to was reanimating the corpse of everything you loved just so you could kill it again and piss on it's quivering corpse.

I fucking hate their writing team.

Regarding the Charr, I picked them in GW2 because the Norn intro cutscene they basically say "wahhh, a dragon kicked us out of our homeland." Charr cutscene, our gods pissed us off, so we fucking killed them.

I'm cool with just being that faction. I play destro in RoR, I like the Horde in Warcraft I-II, I like what the Charr are. That's cool. Just stick with that. Metal.