GW2

[stringpuppets]

Bored as fuck, feeling grumpy and listless and so very awake, so:

Guild Wars 2: Opinion Piece.

The usual disclaimer: Just my personal opinion, and only at level 40. I’d wait until I’ve seen all the game, but I'm kind of bored…


Pros:

• I only paid $25 for this, and for that price, I think it’s definitely value for money - I’d probably even have felt the same way if I had paid full price.
• Pretty graphics. (Prettier than WoW, sans Pandaria.)
• Much more character customization than the average MMO, I believe.
• I like personal quests and branched storylines.
• Daily and monthly targets that award experience and loot, making them worth doing, and also doesn’t require much grinding / farming to complete.
• Significant experience gain for every task, including exploration and crafting, enables alternate forms of levelling.
• Combat is fun in the sense that it’s much more active than just pressing 123, you can actually move and run around while casting all spells.
• I like that stacking spells changes them / adds a bonus effect. It’s slightly different from the usual ‘chain-spells-for-max-damage’ concept.
• Events make things less boring and less linear than just exploring the map in the fastest / most efficient manner, but that being said, the events get repetitive after a while.
• Salvaging is an interesting concept - I like that anyone is able to salvage, whereas in WoW only Enchanters can disenchant items.
• Magic Find - I like the idea of Magic Find and that salvaging items increases MF - much better than Diablo’s concept of MF stacking on gear.
• A separate storage for collectables is definitely a good idea / space saver. (Even if depositing them in the middle of a secluded forest without a bank in sight doesn’t make sense..)
• Individual looting system and shared resources means no competition.
• Everyone can revive players and NPCs and it actually gives experience.
• Weapons cause your skills to change, which makes it very fun to experiment with different styles and switch weapons for different occasions.
• Everyone can try out all the skills and traits for little / no cost.
• Vistas / mazes and jumping puzzles etc are fun and sometimes challenging, definitely a nice change from the running around and opening places.
• Somewhat interactive environment: Can pick up rocks / shovels / whatever and get new skills.
• Clean, pretty interface that’s easy to get used to. Having all the objectives on the right, customized by location and completion, is definitely handy.
• Underwater combat is great. I dislike underwater combat as a rule, and I don’t actively like GW2’s, but it’s much better than most I’ve seen.
• Gathering is fun, there’s a large variety of things to gather from garlic to herbs to onions instead of just spamming the same herb over and over for a level / map.
• Multiple ways to complete a quest is good.
• Initiation and completion of hearts are very convenient and seamless - no more running back and forth to questgivers, unless they require you to hand in stuff.
• Rallying instead of straight-out death is cool.

Neutral:

• Trading post and mailbox being accessed from anywhere - on one hand it’s convenient, but on the other hand it makes no sense…
• Level scaling: On one hand, it’s good because friends of varying levels can play together (to an extent, because gear doesn’t really scale, according to Aki), but on the other hand, you can’t really faceroll through stuff if you want to.
• Versatile roles instead of dedicated tank/heal/dps - No more waiting for tanks and heals, but it also means that jack of all trades, master of none, and that you’re always one of the crowd cause no one stands out. I think I prefer WoW’s system, where classes can switch specializations to dedicated tank/healer/dps, and have an off-spec for times they change their mind and want to play another role. Personal preference anyway, I need to feel special or I won’t be happy. :P
• Crafting: Discovery sounds interesting but google-able recipes make it somewhat pointless. Insane variety of ingredients is nice but also frustrating.
• Skill points that are gained through maps - On one hand, new, interesting, rewards exploration somewhat, but on the other hand once I had all the SP for the spells I was interested in, there’s no incentive to level, because I don’t unlock any new spells from levelling up. (Only trait points I guess, but those aren’t very exciting.)
• No resource (at least for Elementalist) - I don’t know what I feel about this. It’s different. I like having to manage my mana, now all I do is “manage” cooldowns, if that :P But it’s convenient I guess?
• Gold is a lot harder to come by compared to the average MMO. Waypoint costs are kinda expensive, though, especially compared to how much quests reward you, but I’m not actually complaining because I don’t actually have any use for my gold (not yet anyway), so it’s just something different to get used to.
• A lot of zergs - I heard it’s the same for WvW.
• Another interesting thought that doesn’t really affect me - vendor prices being a price floor for the TP works as a way to prevent bots from continually undercutting players and crashing the economy, but also acts as support for botters / gold farmers due to the fixed minimum return on investment they get.
• Voice acting seems kinda mediocre from what I’ve seen, but nothing to really put me off.
• No mounts - It’s not an actual area of contention as much as a personal gripe, because I like mounts, and haste buffs work well enough (I actually find I can traverse a map quite fast), but I, as well as many others I’m sure, prefer mounts, and frankly I’m quite surprised they haven’t added any mounts as some “Store Special” yet.
• Lack of PvP duelling.
• Over-reliance on the F key - exceptionally irritating when you’re trying to interact with a specific object that’s surrounded by other interactable objects. Instead of pointing and clicking, you have to move around until you get the right option. That being said, it doesn’t happen that often to annoy me. I still prefer right click to interact, though.

Cons:

• Lack of skills. Even with 4 trees, traits, weapon skills, underwater / land differences, items and skill points, the amount of skills you can have /active/ at one moment is only 4 trees x 5 spells + 1 heal + 3 utility + 1 elite = 25, and within those 25 a lot of them are very situational and rarely used, at least in PvE. (People who don’t stance dance are pretty much stuck with 9.) IMHO, the tree cooldown of 10 seconds is too long to encourage me to actively stance dance unless I’m really involved in the fight, but that’s just my opinion and I’m very lazy.
• On the same line of combat… I just feel like although it’s active, like I mentioned as a plus point earlier, it requires a lot less.. attention… than WoW. I currently have 8 keybinds and that’s enough for me, whereas in WoW I had well over 30 and still had to click some spells, while at the same time managing cooldowns, line of sight, aggro, silences, stuns, DoT and buff duration, crowd control, etc.
• I might be missing something, but is there no way to cancel a spell during spellcast? Cause it’s a serious liability when you’ve used a wrong spell / targeted the wrong thing, and spamming escape doesn’t work…
• Why does the option to cast at friendlies even exist AND worse still, take up a cooldown??
• Lack of ability to combine identical stackable items: e.g. can’t combine 2 [Basic Salvage Kit] with 10 [Basic Salvage Kit], what?
• Lack of challenging, solo-able bosses - So far I’ve only seen normal mobs, Veterans, and Champions, and quite frankly IMHO the normal mobs and Veterans don’t pose a challenge (at least as far as I’ve been levelling), and Champions are flat-out un-soloable. I would like to see Elites down-able by one (or two) skilled individual(s) with proper management of cooldowns and awareness of their class - I get a sense of accomplishment when I solo challenging stuff.
• IMHO, the party system needs serious improvements. Diana feels that the system disincentives parties, and I actually agree, because credit, experience, and loot, for some strange reason, isn’t shared unless you tag the mob - so what’s the difference between forming a party, and just soloing whilst tagging every stranger’s mob?
• Another one brought up by D was “faux dodge.” As a ranged, I never have to dodge, because I kite / run around. I don’t really see the point of the dodge key, even though I do use it on occasion, but maybe it’ll be more useful as melee.. Even if there’re only two charges before cd.
• Hearts are not fun. Most of the time there are a serious lack of mobs to kill for hearts unless there’s an event going on, meaning a lot of times I’m running around looking for mobs to kill, or forced to do the annoying tasks like move rocks from one place to another. A lot of them are repetitive - Kill this, defend against waves, interact with object, turn into animal to interact with objects. Granted, most MMOs have quests that are boring.
• Lack of cosmetic / flavor items: Everything is either sellable junk, used for crafting, or provides some benefit / buff. I’d like to see more purely “fun” things, e.g. in WoW there are objects to turn you into a snowman / start spewing puke / grow 5 times bigger / view everyone naked, or even simple things like flowers and stuffed toys etc that you can give your friends. I’ve been looking around for things that I can send people as thanks for helping me and literally seen nothing but [Stick of Cotton Candy], which was fucking account bound, I don’t even.
• Similarly, the vendors all seem to sell items that are only useful. I’d like to see vendors that sell fun things like beer / ale / pie / steak / …now I’m hungry….
• Having capslock on changes the ‘ to “……… and I have capslock on a lot……..
• I tried finding this in options but I can’t: No ability to turn the camera without also changing the direction I’m moving in!? That makes no sense and is a serious handicap - I half expect this to be an error on my part and there’s some option to toggle this somewhere.
• Tried finding this in options but can’t either: No option to view more details about mobs - mainly health in numbers instead of color.
• Lack of reliable targeting option - in a messy fight, clicking results in targeting friendlies most of the time, tabbing requires multiple hits of the key to cycle targets, and trying to click on nameplates doesn’t actually do anything. I’d recommend allowing targeting via nameplates that don’t stack, or the option to turn friendly nameplates off so it’s less cluttered.
• Similarly, no way to see who the enemy mob is targeting - I have no idea if I should actually get out of the way or kite because a champ is targeting me, or if they’re just going for someone behind me / near me.
• Map is confusing - doesn’t clearly indicate borders between zones, doesn’t display names of places easily, layers are badly designed, no indicator for instance entrances, among some other problems I had.
• Characters make disturbingly erotic noises for every action from jumping to mining. “Ahh…. Aaahh… AAAHHH……”
• Serious lack of emotes, but that’s just because I’m used to WoW’s huge selection.
• I’ve far from completed the game, but I believe that once you hit 100% completion, there’s no replay value. (Like hell I’m going to 100% on an alt.) Which I can understand, because this isn’t P2P, so there’s no incentive for developers to create compelling reasons for replay.
• Contribution for events are pretty messed up - I can autocast for the last ten seconds of an event and gain a gold contribution, that doesn’t seem fair at all. It’s gotten to the point where, when I see an event, I just ignore it until it’s about to end, then go hit something for credit.
• "Trophies" that can't be sold (despite having a confusing vendor price) and have to be deleted one by one from inventory.

TL,DR: All in all, for the price, and especially a non-subscription model, I think it’s a pretty good game that’s worth buying.

That being said, I’m getting kind of bored. Opening maps and doing similar-concept hearts gets less interesting after repeated exposure, and there isn’t much scenery or anything much that drives me to keep exploring / levelling.