Bregah

@Dark_Lord_Spam said:

@celegorm_menegroth said:

There was in GW1, and it was no less of a grind. Go back and look at the requirements for that armor. I never had a single piece of ascended gear in GW1 because I was unwilling and unable to farm the required zones.

I'm not sure what you're remembering, but there wasn't any gear tiering in the first game beyond whatever expensive skins you wanted to farm. There was Infusion, but if you didn't want to do the one sort-of easy mission necessary to get it yourself, you could buy a five-minute run for donations.

Yeah, that one has me confused, too. Infusion wasn't really all that tricky, and other than that, the only real "grind" would be to get top runes and insignias, and they were nothing compared to what this Ascended armor looks to be.

The armor grinds in GW1 were for looks only, which was fine. Getting max stat armor (not including runes and insignias) was very, very easy and quick, and GW1 did not suffer from that ease or speed.

I think this change with the addition of a new tier of gear is hugely disappointing.

While I agree that there was a lack of "things to do" at 80, the Manifesto and all those dev quotes led me to believe that the GW2 team was coming up with many OTHER things to do at 80 besides getting new gear.

If I wanted to play a game that was a gear grind, I'd be playing WoW. At least they know how to do it, with all the practice they have.

I was expecting many things like the PvP mini-games at the Halloween event to be added, not quite simply a gear grind. Those games where fun the few times I played them, but because the event was so short I chose not to play them that much - because I chose to do other things - but things like that I kind of expected to be permanent.

I think the complaints about a lack of things to do were/are totally justified, but that's because what's in the game isn't really all that much, or isn't designed very well. What I mean by that is that yes, there are a ton of zones to explore and "complete" - especially if you want a legendary - the rewards are so small compared to Orr that at some level you always feel you're partially wasting your time, especially if you're also after crafting mats. Level 80 rewards for level 80 players in lower zones would spread everyone out a LOT (as so many people dislike the Orr zones), and perhaps to make that workable you could downlevel everyone an extra level or 2 - I don't know.

In the few dungeon runs I've done, I must say I've not been very impressed with them - I never felt I was being as challenged as much as even a WoW 5 man boss by any of the GW2 bosses - for the record I was always healer main/tank alt in every MMO I've played (I find DPS rather boring). I also am not really interested in any of the skins from the dungeons - but that's a personal thing, and I was just fine not doing many dungeons.

Also, so much of the content that was here at launch is still buggy as hell with no sign of being fixed. Some classes are still rather bad (ranger and necro from what I can tell - my 2 80's are Mesmer and Guardian, and my next highest is a 20 ele). And from reports (I've just gotten home tonight, so haven't been in for the new event) this Lost Shore first 10 hours has been an absolute bugfest and lagfest.

It just appears they are trying to do so much, too much for their staff, so none of it comes off very well.

To this point, the only changes in WvW thus far (that I can remember) are the removal of rewards for escorting Yaks and the removal of the Orbs. As I WvW quite a bit, there really needs to be more love given to WvW (I would start by drastically overhauling things that ANet probably never will, but my aim would to make as many of the matchups as fun as possible for as many people as possible - meaning close matchups - so I would somehow consolidate servers into multi-server teams or something similar).

It's not that I can never do a gear grind. I looked over my WoW stats (haven't been subscribed in over a year), and at my raidiest point (ICC during LK) I have, combined, 57 kills of each of the 1st four bosses in ICC, if you take into account 10 man and 25 man and normal and heroic. That's absurd, really.

Avoiding such farming is THE REASON I got GW2. If they had said "We're going the WoW route, but we'll do it better" I would have never touched the game (no matter how much I love GW1). This change is making GW2 more like WoW.

I guess I was expecting this game to be different, and to add many fun things to do at 80, but really all it has (apart from WvW) is grind. And the grind will now, pretty much, be the Fractals and Orr. Orr sucks (visually, thematically, mob density, etc), and I simply do not want to grind one dungeon forever, no matter how much fun it is the first 10 times I do it. Based on the numbers from early reports, NOTHING is fun enough to do it as many times as it seems it will take to get a full Ascended gear.

And I was expecting this game to be different because Arena Net said it would be.

But honestly, with the way GW2 looks to be heading - if I want to play a game like GW2 I'll just go ahead and play either WoW or Rift, as each of them do this type of thing better.

I'd love to join up with the GB guild. Been listening to the podcast the past few weeks, and while I wasn't in any beta events, I've pre-purchased the game and am downloading/installing right now.

Played GW 1 a moderate amount (mostly the past couple months building up my weak Hall of Monuments), and have played loads of MMOs in the past, with FFXI and WoW the 2 I've put the most time into. In WoW I was mostly into PvP (resto shaman and resto druid), so am looking forward to WvWvW and maybe structured. Planning on playing a Mesmer in GW 2 (though that was the plan in 1 and I ended up playing mostly as a Monk), and looking forward to getting in game tonight!