@rempresent: @zomgfruitbunnies: I'm going to use random's posts as a base to offer a competing perspective on where the game lies currently, as I don't have the fortitude to think over every individual aspect, myself.
@random45 said:
As one of the first comments said, it was more of a cosmetic grind at the end of the game rather than a gear grind, due to the lack of ascended gear. Legendary weapons for instance didn't dramatically raise your stats like they do now. When they released the fractals dungeon (not a bad dungeon at all, but it gets very grindy, since you have to keep playing it to get agony resistance so you can keep playing it to get to the higher levels), they also released the first bit of ascended gear. Ascended gear I think was their answer for end-game content, since exotic gear was very cheap and easy to produce.
@random45 said:
-I DO NOT recommend doing the Ascended gear grind, since getting the gear literally takes weeks unless if you have a LOT of money. They put an artificial timelimit on crafting certain ascended items where you can only do it once per day, and there's absolutely no justification for it other than they want the grind to last a while.
Ascended gear was, in fact, meant to account for the complaints they received near launch about a lack of endgame progression. I don't necessarily agree with its implementation, mostly because despite playing consistently for a couple of years, now, I still find myself reluctant to eat the costs associated with many exotic-tier items. Players gon' play, though, and here we are.
What's interesting about ascended gear is that the grind and expense associated with each piece is inversely proportional to how large the stat increase is over the next-lowest item in that slot. It's commonly accepted that in terms of upgrades necessary to stay competitive in level 80 PvE content ("competitive" is applied loosely, here, you can do everything in the game sans Fractals with exotic gear and some moxxie), the priority is trinkets > weapons > armor > infusions. Those last couple can take hundreds upon hundreds of gold worth of investment to build out, but are associated with just a marginal stat boost. Ascended weapons and armor, if you choose to craft them yourself to save yourself a trading post premium, do necessitate you wait a day between each basic ascended material (cloth, leather, ingot, plank) you craft, but this was done to preserve the value of these items rather than to impose arbitrary grind. Thus, ascended gear has consistently carried a high prestige where many exotics that can be traded outright simply do not.
Trinkets are separate case, however, in that acquiring them is both comparatively very easy and generally worthwhile. Basically, the trinkets are sold for a currency known as "laurels", which used to be earned by completing your daily and monthly achievements, but have been changed to tie into login rewards, and also are given out in a couple of other achievement-related instances. What this means is that within 112 days of taking a minute to open your client (it does not reset upon missing a day), you can have enough laurels for all your best-in-slot trinkets. There are some other avenues by which to reduce the time and expense required - rings can be gotten more quickly with Fractals of the Mists currency, accessories can be bought with guild mission currency, and amulets are cheaper with World vs. World currency - but for people starting out, laurels are a simple option.
@random45 said:
PvP also was a bit different in that it was actually a bit MORE of a grind than it is now, and it required an insane amount of playtime to reach the high levels. Think of the grind to Grand Marshal in vanilla WoW, and you have a baseline for how insane this grind was, the only difference was that it was actually possible to make it to GM in WoW, whereas by the time they revamped the PvP system in Guild Wars 2, NO ONE managed to reach the max level. The old system also rewarded cosmetic items, which were separate from PvE cosmetics. So back then, you KNEW who was good at PvP by the gear they wore, or at least that they've played for a long while. Now that you can use skins of gear you've gotten in PvE, there's no longer that indicator of who's actually good at PvP and who's not.
The new PvP system basically got rid of ALL of that, and made achieving the max level in PvP actually possible, and they added reward tracks fairly recently as well. However, despite all of those changes, Anet is slower than molasses when it comes to balancing PvP, even at launch they were slow. They let the meta go unchecked for months before finally changing things, and most of the times their balance changes introduce a host of new problems.
Other things that have changes greatly since launch is that they added in a new queue system that SUCKS, since you're incapable of queuing up for games with your friends. Now you just go to a random guy in the city for the minigame you want to play, and he zaps you there, and it doesn't matter if you're partied up or not. The only way to play a game with your friends is to just have both of you keep going in and out of minigames until you FINALLY manage to get into one together, and even then it's only for the duration of the timer, which can be anywhere from five to fifteen minutes, it's just awfully designed. People have been complaining about this for over a year, but Anet just doesn't give a shit.
@random45 said:
-PvP can be a lot of fun for a while, but a recent change made it unbearable (they got rid of team-matching making and solo match making and threw them both into the same pool... You can probably imagine that most games are a complete stomp now). There's still hot join at least, but it cuts your reward in half, since you're not playing ranked, and it's still prone for stomps, since you can switch teams at will.
I actually hear tell that many "hardcore PvP players" were disappointed with the reduction in rank grind, given that higher rank finishers/emotes are now less of a status symbol, but the thing is they were never an indicator of skill, just of time spent. Likewise, the old cosmetic reward system was only a representation of both time spent in the game mode and RNG luck, as which skins you acquired were determined by a simple dice roll. Now, however, there are cues for both dedication and skill in PvP. First, there are reward tracks you can select that will earn you skins exclusive to the game type, e.g. an armor set that would require around 200 wins or 700 losses to complete (keep in mind that reward tracks give out lesser bonuses as you work toward the big goal), or a back piece that can be earned more quickly. Second, you have rewards that have been tied to ladder and tournament standings, like a way-fucking-fancier armor set and a limited minipet. Speaking as a person who generally avoided PvP for most of my playtime and in the past few months has become hugely invested in it: the incentive to try it out is there, whereas before things were a bit intangible.
As to ArenaNet's balance policies: it's a love-it or hate-it strategy. I spent years learning to appreciate their methodology with my time in GW1, and I'm not really upset about it, here. What I tend to dislike in a competitive game is having a setup I've invested time, money, and research into ripped out from under me. This can be especially grating in a free-to-play atmosphere, where you might spend #ActualDollars on weapons/cosmetics only to have that character become worthless for play in a second. This dev team allows time for things to settle, during which highly skilled players do a fairly good job of discovering nuances and interactions that would be lost before they had a chance to exist if there was a rush to patch out anything the player-base perceived as "op". Generally speaking, every profession currently has two or three roles they can fill effectively in the current meta, though you'll find a predisposition toward the Celestial setup (which increases each stat a small amount) used on very versatile professions (such as the engineer and elementalist), while glassy builds (like thieves and mesmers) are having a tougher time.
For activities (GW2's mini-games, ranging from very enjoyable to very trivial), the queue system does definitively suck. It cannot ensure players are placed at the beginning of competition, and makes it impossible to group reliably. However, activities are due for a revamp, anyway, and this seems like something that should be fixed when/if that occurs. For PvP itself, the queue has been absolutely vital to its continued population health, especially with the recent changes. Essentially, abuse of the system is now incredibly difficult where before it took only a small amount of dedication to line up opposition you could consistently destroy. Desertion also now carries a penalty, and both the ladder and MMR have been overhauled to be worth a damn. Teams can now be matched against solo queues, but the matchmaking system will account for that, along with rating, PvP rank, group composition, ladder rank, and players' dishonor (i.e. attempts to exploit the queue, desert, or be generally shitty). Basically, matches feel more consistent than they did previously.
@random45 said:
Another new thing is that they nerfed the drop rate of higher level crafted gear into the ground, and they also made it so dye doesn't drop at all anymore. Remember at launch when it would drop very consistently? Not anymore. Since they changed dye making it go from account wide rather than character specific, they made the only place to get unidentified dyes from either the Cash Shop, or a random drop from the Black Lion Chests (which require a key from the cash shop, keys can also be gotten from the personal story and from completing zones, but it's not a reliable way to do it, not anymore).
They also made every world boss have a set timer now, so you can just go to a website and check out when a world boss will spawn, and teleport there. Now all world bosses guarantee a rare drop, which isn't great, but it's at least better than what they used to drop (which was garbage). As a result of these changes, there are always people farming the world bosses, so they're all do-able. That is with the exception of Tequatl, which has been so significantly buffed that you NEED an organized raid group to even stand a chance against him. I've only managed to kill him twice, and even then he didn't drop much anything worth it, so I just stopped going to that fight. It's way too difficult for too little reward compared to the other bosses. There's the Jungle Wyrm fight, which is also like Tequatl, so no one does that fight either.
Speaking of cooking, they nerfed the HELL out of it. At launch, it was possible to get to the max level just with cooking, and finding new recipes was really easy since you could buy food from the karma vendor. Now most food can only be bought from specific vendors all around the world, so you have to level up in the zones to actually level cooking too. It's a dumb change, and makes cooking significantly less interesting as a result. It's the only profession in the game too that got nerfed so hard, the rest are pretty much untouched except for the ascended 401-500 path.
ALL champion level enemies also drop exotic loot bags as well. More often than not, the bags contain crap, but there's a rare chance that it'll have something useful to use, like tier six crafting items, or even a rare or exotic item, or an ascended item if you're insanely lucky. Unfortunately, this change introduced the 'Champion Train', where a large group of people who just go around the map farming the champion monsters, since they're all on a specific timer. It makes some events a lot less exciting as a result, and it's just an incredibly boring grind (I would know, I participated in this more than once). Anet's response to this is to make champion monster's health scale to the amount of players, like world bosses, but the difference is that they STILL do shit damage, so it's just a VERY long and boring fight to get what'll probably amount to as a shit reward.
Okay, so I'll get this out of the way concerning loot: people loooooooove them balls to complain about how crappy the loot is in GW2. There are memes about the prevalence of blue/green-tier drops that have been tired since launch. Despite this, the economy in the game is consistently inflating, to an almost worrying degree for newcomers. What this means is that when a bunch of gear you don't need drops for you in this game, you should just see it as your steady income continuing to be steady. There's a reason so many people choose to farm champion bags: it's reliable earnings, even with the high percentage of lame items they contain. Speaking of which, event scaling has been implemented since the launch of the game, and is far more accurate than it used to be (though you'll still occasionally see a zerg tear a champion mob to shreds before the game realizes there's more than two people fighting it).
On to specifics.
- I don't know what he means by "higher level crafted gear". Gear with exclusive inscription/insignia salvages, maybe? I can't confirm that one way or another.
- Unidentified dyes are still on the loot table for every enemy in the game. They are, indeed, much rarer than they were previously. Whereas before they were perhaps on par with rare-tier drops, they're now rarer than exotics. Be that as it may, the fact that they're also now account-bound means prices weren't drastically affected on the trading post. Unidentifieds go for 50 silver (about twice what they used to) because everyone loves to gamble their money away, but most common dyes cap out at a couple of silver apiece, and uncommons aren't much more expensive. There are a few limited-edition rare dyes that are as expensive as a piece of exotic or even ascended gear, but the simple answer is to only pick up what you absolutely want.
- That cooking has gameplay tied to it, rather than being a few free character levels for lazy power-levelers, is just a good change. This is a subjectively objective fact. Besides, you can still speed to tier 400 cooking having completed zero renown hearts with about as much gold as it costs to, say, sneeze on the interface of tier 500 tailor.
World bosses! They look pretty. They're mostly really easy. The first time you run one (unless it's Tequatl or Evolved Jungle Wurm, those don't allow for fuck-around time), don't follow the zerg. Stand where you want to to make the fight look as impressive as it was designed to look. Be sure to tag the big thing enough to get event credit. Everyone else will probably be hacking at the ankles, but that's because we're all miserable husks (aside: don't attack husks during Jungle Wurm unless you're a condition damage spec) who see no wonder in the world. Now, you don't have to be massively intimidated by Tequatl. If you show up about 15 minutes prior to the daily server reset or before the next spawn three hours later, that map instance will win the fight 80% of the time. Just read up on it a little beforehand, as you don't want to be running around in circles feeling like you're contributing nothing and wondering why everyone's flying over your head. As for the Jungle Wurm, you can just show up similarly to Tequatl, and if you're lucky your map will even manage to kill one of the bosses, but there are three, and I've never seen a PUG map manage to take them all down in one go. It's pretty simple (if attention-demanding) work to get most of the Wurm achievements even without winning the fight, but you'll want to join one of the dedicated boss-raid guilds to have a legitimate shot at it.
@random45 said:
World vs World has changed a little bit as well. They added a new map (which sucks, since the teams typically ignore each other and just got the objectives - it's an insane loot train as a result though if you're into that sort of thing), and the three borderland maps had their middle section completely revamped to have ruins you need to capture to give your team an advantage. It's sort of like the orbs from when the game first came out, but it can't be exploited. It's very boring just standing around at the ruins though. They also added a new leveling system to World vs World, where you can level up certain abilities specific to that game mode, like increasing how much damage you do to guards, or increasing how much damage you do on an arrow cart - things like that. That is a positive change at least, but really, other than that, WvW has remained almost exactly as it was at launch. It's probably the most fun part of the game for me, and the only one I keep returning to.
WvW is my least-played mode, so I can't comment a lot on overall server strategy, but as @avenlaya says it's easy enough to find a commander, follow their tag, and watch the chat for their instructions. Once you're a pretty comfortable with how things like supply work and what zerg rotations tend to be, you can roam solo or with a small group and take on smaller objectives like dolyaks, sentries, camps, or even towers if you've got enough siege with you. Ruins don't tend to come into play much, which is unfortunate since it's some of the best level design in those maps. WvW ranks feel somewhat similar to PvP reward tracks, but pay out somewhat slower (though you can buy them with spare laurels) and are more RNG-heavy. Running with a coordinated zerg tends to be decent farming all on its own, however. The real shame with ranks is that the points you get to spend on WvW-relevant abilities come so slowly, and the early tiers of most do not make a huge impression in terms of how they impact gameplay. If you stick with it, though, you can build out some interesting set-ups for the role you want to play in the weekly wars.
@random45 said:
The last big change that you'll immediately notice if you level up a new character after playing at launch is that the leveling system is completely changed. I heard they used the version from their Chinese launchof the game on the western version, which really made things a lot worse. Things you had initially at launch, like the Pet interface, the ability to unlock all of your weapon's abilities immediately, and small things like that require you to level up first before they're unlocked. Weapon switching I believe was changed from unlocking at level 7 to unlocking at level 20, and they just spread everything out MUCH further. At launch, you could use all of your abilities by level 30, it was just a matter of getting enough skill points to unlock them. NOW you have to buy each individual abilitiy with money, and unless if you have a max level character funding you, it's just not possible to get them all right away.
As a person who was incredibly down on the levelling changes, I'll note that my experience with it has largely come to getting a few extra goodies when I level my alts. But I'm an invested player who hasn't created a new (non-key farming) character since launch. I still worry that there's a risk new players might become disinterested in the experience due to the reduction in early-game complexity. Leveling speed at those low levels was boosted at the same time, though, so I'll just maintain that I really haven't had enough experience with these systems to make any declarations as to their effectiveness. Since I've been a proponent of improved tutorializing in Guild Wars 2 since near the launch of the game, it was a disappointment to see them sidestep the issue by just shaving the progression curve.
When random says "abilities", I assume he means traits, in which case they are now very expensive to buy outright for your character. Really, though, you should be completing the challenges in the open world that unlock them for you. These challenges aren't terrifically well-planned, so some early traits might be arbitrarily tied to late-game content, and it can be frustrating have enough points for an upgrade you want to apply to your character and be unable to do so. That said, you are able to buy them if you're desperate for a particular trait and unwilling to seek it out, and characters created before this change were grandfathered in with all their old traits intact, meaning it's not necessarily a big change for returning players.
@random45 said:
Speaking of max level characters funding, another big change was that they made ALL currency account-wide, and there's absolutely no way to change it. Some hate it, but I like it.
I don't know of anyone who preferred character-bound currency to the convenience of account-bound, but I wouldn't like to shake the hand of someone who did.
@random45 said:
-The story leveling up is very bland, but the one they're releasing over the months is also uninteresting and some of the missions are just painfully boring. I admit this is more subjective, I'm sure there's SOMEONE who finds it to be interesting, but dear god, it's just not for me. Plus, if you missed a part of it, it's gonna cost you five dollars to buy it.
Look, I'll freely admit that I'm a sucker for stories in games - most stories. It's something that medium can do incredibly well but that so many creators are terrified to engage with. That's in the open, so here's my assessment of the various means of story implementation in this game:
In the personal story (what launched in the base game), levels 1-30 are the highlight in terms of intimate, character-specific narrative, and can actually be fairly gripping depending on the race you play. Asura and charr have the best writing, hands-down. 40-60 starts strong if you join an order you've not yet played through, as you become familiar with their headquarters, their workings, and their leadership. Your character gets a sense of defined purpose, too, though it fizzles out quickly as you're lead around by subpar writing and characters who feel like they contain more charisma than the story is allowing them. The fact that there's a big, emotional turn that's mirrored almost identically in each of the three orders is laughable. 70-80 can feel rambling in terms of plot, and introduces/kills off many characters you'll have no ties to unless you've played through half of the available storylines in the game. That said, there's some legitimately impressive spectacle toward the end; stuff that certainly looks awesome even when it doesn't feel it.
The "living world" got off to what I thought was a wonderful start after the game's launch. Halloween was bonkers just like you wanted it to be, Southsun was an incredible event if you were there live (though obviously an inconsistent experience in a way that would have been unsustainable going forward), and Wintersday actually felt joyful and surprising. When Season 1 started in 2013, the tempo slowed drastically as the development team figured out their new delegation scheme. Flame and Frost was two updates' worth of narrative and gameplay stretched over three months of releases. Still, it ended impressively with an entirely new dungeon appearing over a brief two-week period and some foreshadowing about what was to come. Super Adventure Box was and remains incredible. It was entirely unique, it came out of nowhere, and was just charming as all hell. #SABRound3
I'm not going to cover each of the remaining 21 updates, but that there were twenty-one meaty fucking updates over eleven months still impresses me to no end. Obviously, parts of the player community felt the story was progressing too slowly, or that *ahem* certain characters weren't up to filling the role they needed to. While I'll agree the storytelling and dialogue remained average through about three-quarters of Season 1, at a certain point it turns such that there are suddenly what feel like real stakes to the events you're participating in; characters evolve into more than skillset + trope + objective. That feeling increases ten times over at the excellent conclusion. Participating in that sequence was one of the highlights I've had playing this game (of gaming in 2014, if I'm being honest), and the narrative carried its share. I hope ArenaNet is soon able to revamp the Season 1 content to people who missed it as it occurred.
Season 2 just wrapped up, and will remain available for purchase in-game (though, come on, people, it should be free if you're not a total bum about logging in), so I won't delve too deeply into the ups and downs of the storyline. Disappointingly, the update schedule once again slowed, with only eleven updates releasing over the course of the past ten months. What's been an exciting development, though, is the release of two entirely new zones to the game (free even to those who haven't unlocked the story). Their map-wide mechanics are as engaging as anything found in the vanilla open-world, and just roaming around them can be an interesting experience, with fundamental elements of the landscape altering over time (they're also beautiful, but that's hardly news when concerning ArenaNet's art department).
As for the story itself, Season 2 is much more immediately compelling, and the instanced missions do a better job of establishing tone (the early goings feel like a sort of noir/cop drama/Western amalgamation). Unfortunately, the voiced dialogue remains inconsistent (though John DiMaggio shines during his appearances) and character motivations are sometimes short-shrifted in service of inflating the player character, which feels like an overcorrection based on criticism received for Season 1 and the personal story. Certain chapters were criticized as uneventful lulls by players who were able to complete their content within a day following release, but much like your typical TellTale game, Season 2 stands stronger as a whole. Even when the narrative pacing cooled, I was always impressed by the designers' ability to work within the limits of their engine to produce interesting settings and encounters (minor spoiler: there's a goddamn stealth mission in there). There's also some real heavy-hitting trips for players of the original Guild Wars to enjoy. By the way, if you're considering catching up with the story, I advise you to do it now, as it seems as though the game is going to be taking a couple of big steps forward in the coming months. Also, heads up: until you're finished, DO NOT WATCH THOSE TRAILERS.
Thanks to @random45 for his help in framing this hot mess of a post.
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