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The Guild Wars 2 Thread

Drakortha

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not bad, but how much of that is idling?

Very little. I clocked a lot of hours just sPvPing in ranked all day for months just for example.
 
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How does the expac hold up compared to HoT and PoF? I miss HoT's vertical maps and hated PoF's mob density. Also, is the story actually good this time? Are there good setpieces?
 

Drakortha

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How does the expac hold up compared to HoT and PoF? I miss HoT's vertical maps and hated PoF's mob density. Also, is the story actually good this time? Are there good setpieces?

Mob density is much lower compared to HoT and PoF, especially in the first two maps. A lot of enemy mobs have a yellow nametag so they are optional to fight. 3rd & 4th maps have a lot more trash mobs to wade through though I'm not sure it ever gets to PoF levels. If you like vertical maps you will probably enjoy some of these. The 2nd & 3rd maps in particular have a lot of verticality.

The story is fine, characters are fine. It's about what you'd expect nothing to write home about but nothing really bad either. You either care about the story or you don't. I didn't finish it yet, though. But what I played so far felt a bit rushed, especially around the 3rd map. Maybe the developers didn't have enough time, since there isn't much substance there. You sort of just breeze through it.
 
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ADL

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Seems Guild Wars 2 is one of those big successful games that no one outside the community ever hears about. Fourth expansion confirmed, active players doubled since the Elona expansion's release, new Cantha maps coming in story updates.
While the end of the Elder Dragon cycle might seem like a natural moment to start winding things down, we’re happy to say loudly and emphatically that Guild Wars 2 has a bright future ahead of it!

Last July, we said that we were making some big changes at the studio that are necessary to make our ambitious goals a reality. Since then, we’ve strengthened our leadership team, worked to improve our communication with all of you, and shipped the third expansion for Guild Wars 2. We’ve also invested in major foundational long-term projects to ensure the game’s future, like DirectX11, the Legendary Armory, and WvW World Restructuring.

This long-term focus is paying off—we’re seeing incredible growth in the community. In fact, the number of active Guild Wars 2 players has more than doubled over the last three years. This growth has helped Guild Wars 2: End of Dragons outsell our previous expansion, Guild Wars 2: Path of Fire. Not bad for a game getting ready to celebrate its 10th anniversary.
76da5220318-Spring-Roadmap_EN-1-768x432.jpg

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/arenanet-studio-update-the-future-of-guild-wars-2/
 

Rahdulan

Omnibus
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Also finally making season 1 replayable if you weren't around originally. Throughout the year in episodes.
 

ADL

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I wasn't a fan of Living World season 1 and Scarlet is a fucking annoying character but I'm glad they're doing it for the sake of wish fulfillment and completeness. They've definitely gotten a lot better at the whole living world thing over the years but if you weren't around for it, my advice is: don't expect too much out of it.
 

Drakortha

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Couldn't have asked for better news and it's come much sooner than I could have ever anticipated.

The Steam release will be big for GW2 and with QoL improvements to the new player experience GW2 is going to be on fire (in a good way). I have no interest in any other MMO, especially now since it seems I'm on the right ship. GW2 has been very niche for far too long so let's hope Anet can knock it out of the park.
 

dacencora

Guest
It’s actually not a terrible experience at all, and it can be quite fun, but yes, a very poor sequel. I’m actually a secondary, in that I played GW2 first, but I never played very much tbh. They’re vastly different gameplay styles and their worlds are barely connected because they changed it so much for GW2. GW1 is much more to my taste than GW2, however, it is still pretty fun to run around and explore in GW2. As far as kind of similar games, SWTOR has better story content and WoW is much more fun, gameplay wise. So in the end, GW2 has something to offer but probably only if there’s something about WoW or SWTOR that bothers you a ton.
 
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It probably helps to not think of GW2 as a "sequel". It's more like a completely different game with a story that is a fanfic of GW1 that is utterly different. If you go in expecting an all around great game or a sequel to GW1, you're going to have a really bad time. Best to appreciate the game for what it actually does right, and the move on.

Story wise, the writing is awful and most of the characters are forgettable, but there is a very strong sense of "adventure". FFXIV's new patch coming next week is called "Newfound Adventure", bet let's be honest: you're just going to kill mobs, read a glorified visual novel/watch a movie for a couple hours, kill more mobs in a dungeon you'll only do once, and that's that. So much for adventure (I like that game for other reasons). GW2, on the other hand, is one of the few fantasy games in recent memory that really does feel like you are on an adventure, not just playing a glorified murder simulator interlaced with a movie. Every patch, you travel to a large, brand new zone that has a new method of traversal that you learn to use, such as hang gliding through a dense jungle and riding airstreams, navigating caves of poison gas, spiderman swinging inside a volcano, or riding on a giant rabbit that leaps up cliffs in the desert. GW2 also has a lot of engaging non-combat gameplay, such as helping kids build a snowman army to scare off mobs, helping an overworked chef quickly cook a lot of food for an army, filling buckets of water to put out fires at a base camp, playing with dragon hatchlings, etc.

It also helps that GW2's story doesn't overstay its welcome. Episodes are about 2-3 hours long and expansions are about 6-10 hours long. You can beat the whole story in a couple weeks, and 95% of that playtime is spent actually playing the game. Contrast that with FFXIV's gargantuan 400+ hour long story, half of which is spent watching cutscenes with janky animations and bad lighting. In GW2, I felt like I went to far more places and did more stuff in a fraction of the time spent playing FFXIV.

WoW is much more fun, gameplay wise

Hm... it depends. I think WoW's classes felt really fun to play during MoP, before the great prune happened, when classes had lots of flavor abilities and felt strong. But I'm not a fan of rotational gameplay. GW2's classes are simpler, but GW2's combat typically has more stuff going on, particularly during meta events where there are lots of things to do like hopping into a cannon to shoot down a dragon, or planting bombs to blow up a gate, or reviving downed players, etc. And GW2's setpiece battles are a blast to play. The big bads, the Elder Dragons, are too big to traditionally fight, so they are fought in creative ways, such as shooting them down and trapping them, stabbing their eye out, chasing them through the sky, hopping into an elder dragon, etc. Sure beats the confrontation with the literal incarnation of death... boiling down to whacking the back of his ankles.

I think that ties into the meta events, one of GW2's greatest strengths, where it feels like you are really there in the midst of a complex, multi-step military operation, but it's not frustrating to play like traditional WoW-style raids where you are expected to wipe hundreds of times on a single boss, and have to have the correct gear and be up to date on icyveins with what your rotation is, and have to find guilds to raid with and get involved in guild drama.

GW2 has something to offer but probably only if there’s something about WoW or SWTOR that bothers you a ton.

Other strengths include the lack of a gear treadmill. Once you reach level 80, you just drop a few gold buying berserker exotics and superior runes of infiltration off of the auction house, and then you're set for the rest of the game's lifetime. That also makes transmogging your character less tedious and immersion breaking. You will never have to constantly teleport back to Orgrimmar or Limsa to reapply it every time you obtain a better piece of gear from a quest, because you don't really obtain better pieces of gear in GW2.

GW2 probably delivers the best beastman fantasy in any MMO I've seen. If you play Charr, your character is hunched over and looks like an inhuman beastman, not a reskinned human. Running on all fours also sells it (Worgen in WoW can also do this, but it is treated as a mount with a cast time, rather than seamless and automatic like in GW2). Male Charr also had a fantastic voice acting with Ron Yuan (sadly he was replaced halfway through season 3).

AHLSgnq.png


As for WoW, it is hard justifying playing it today. It's unfun on multiple levels. All of the good content came out years ago and if you were ever interested in WoW then you probably already played it, and some of that content has been removed from the game (MoP and WoD legendary questlines) or are arbitrarily unavailable most of the time (Mage Tower challenge). Each expansion after MoP has brought less and less content with it, culminating in Shadowlands where you finish the questing over a weekend and that's it. The story since Legion is somehow less coherent than GW2's storyline. The roleplaying scene is dead. You don't get huge PvP wars out in the world anymore like you did back in 2013. Classes are nowhere near as fun as they used to be. Russell Brower is gone and WoW's good music went with him. The only thing left to WoW's name is its aesthetics, which look fantastic.
 
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NoMoneyNoFameNoDame

Artist Formerly Known as Prosper
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Hello men after playing some more I have decided to update my GW2 opinion.

Background:
-I do not own any GW2 expansion. F2P only.
-My computer and GW2 client are fairly modern.



Trigger Warning: I give some high praise.


PROS:

-You need a high IQ. I misinterpreted GW2 as merely an ADHD sim.
Rather the real issue is you need a high IQ to navigate the density of the content.
I didn't think i'd ever say this for a game that's derivative,
but it's actually legit harder to play than the original.
I therefore consider this bulletpoint a pro because it probably forces most casuals to quit.
Although it almost forced me, a GW1 player to quit as well.

-Swimming. It just works.

-Pets. You can tame pets you find in towns and underwater.
It always bothered me how few pets there were and the limits on taming in GW1.
GW2 promises way more and they've been thoughtufl about where they showup.
I appreciate this. (note this does not refer to mini-pets)

-I did some of the "My Story" content and it actually does remind me of the first game.
It's moving kind of slow but so did GW1 Prophecies Pre-Searing.
So far the dialog isn't awful and the quests are about what you expect
for new player content. It remains to be seen if this turns into an actual
"epic" storyline like GW1. This will be the crucial factor on if I give up on the game
entirely.

-The game does use instancing for proper quests. Which means it's not a total
break from GW1 way of handling things. As I play the game more I may have to update
my opinion again on this. I was wrong in my earlier assumption that everything is
just janky open-world instances with no limit.

-While inventory is limited, I learned you can access a bank in your hometown and that has
fairly generous expansion to your existing inventory. With tons of usable junk/crafting slots
all already unlocked. (as far as I can tell.). No fee necessary to pay.

-Unlike GW1 there is far more ways to plan out your progression in terms of how you
will divide your attention. By this I mean there are lots of things you can do to earn "points" for
different a multitude of point categories.
Karma, Wreaths, etc
GW2 seems superior to GW1 in atleast this way.


-There is a special charm to how the game presents
things you've unlocked for leveling etc.
GW2 does this sort of thing better than GW1.
I only bring this up because before I was uncertain if it was absent-minded
casual-gamer bullshit tacked on. But actually it's pretty nice for what it is.


-I discovered the way to do build customization is you invest "hero points" into signets.
But you have a choice in which and how much you train in a signet. And
importantly you're not locked into just one either.
Many familiar categories of stat points appear to be lumped into
this signet stuff.
There are also specializations and elite specializations to further customize your build.
But they have higher level requirements to start investing in.
I therefore declare this bulletpoint a pro, because acceptable player freedom is present.

-Say what you want about GW2, the mini-games are impressive.
The Super Adventure Box specifically is far more "prosperous" than my own game.
I only went into it because I wondered if I could get XP from it.
What I found was a whole world arranged around one game. It's basically the devs
showing off what they can do in their engine. That.. or a clueless-millenial type wanted to
"design" content for the GW2, and in typical never-played the actual game fashion,
picked a random retro-game title to turn into a high-production 3d spin-off.


-I was overly harsh about the "painterly" aesthetic.
Most of the loading screens do pass muster and have visible scenery.
The worldmap and minimap art is pretty decent as well.
There must have been something else that upset me before.
Maybe it's the unexplored areas?


-The game itself looks great. It's definitely better than I could have done as an artist and
as a designer. They only cut corners by indulging in an over-WoWification.
Specifically I mean the atmosphere not the cartoonyness of WoW.
Keep in mind this is the benefit with a fairly modern computer and modern GW2 client.

-GW2 looks mostly like sequel to GW1.
I wasn't sure of this before but after going through the Asuran area,
this is definitely not a demake of GW1. Meaning it's not a step backward.
One caveat is all the new elaborate grandeur does make the game feel not as humble as GW1.
"Less is More" is not GW2's style.
To summarize, GW2 LOOKS like a sequel, but does not look like an idealized expansion or remake of GW1.

CONS:


-GW1 is a game anyone can play. It's a game where you may get lost but always know what you're goal is. GW1 is a game that takes you through a world in a decentralized way but with finality, and it's magnificent.
GW2 however is a world that wants to be a game. GW2 is about participation in micro-rituals of gameplay instead of conquering parts of the game. Specifically GW2 is about a "living world" and being lost to its motions.
GW2 is about the whispers of finality that will never come, the fake finality that allows us to stay and do whatever.
GW2 is a dream that dare not turn lucid or its magic would be lost.


-If you are a GW1 player GW2 is a shit sandwhich to start a new character in.
You have to go through a long process of unlocking everything via leveling up.
Like everything. Inventory slots, equipment slots, even skill slots (yes not just skills themselves).
AFAIK you can't grind your way around these level limitations but by leveling up.

-Game occasionally gives you too much stuff as rewards and it's not clear what to do if your inventory is full.
So you sit there with the ui-prompt open taking up screenspace as you
try to free-up space. Implication being: constantly managing your inventory is expected.

-Level Scaling is for the mentally-unbalanced.

-Some of the UI could do better by dropping the colorful bullshit it's doing.
Especially things that need to be immersive like dialog.
Here the "Less Is More" approach would have been a better choice.
I don't want to see splashes of colorfull bullshit runnning around on my UI when i'm trying to
absorb the story.

-UI is a clusterfuck overall. It's utterly unintuitive. I no longer feel bad about UI
i've made in the recent past.

-Navigation in some town locations is a clusterfuck.
It's easy to get lost. Which is annoying when you end up spending 10 minutes as a noob
to find a quest marker. Most towns/outposts are decent but it's unfortunate though that a noob location is so dense and over-the-top that you cannot navigate by eye.
Perhaps the game designers expected noobs would learn it by memory first before doing any quests?

-Speaking of navigating by eye, in battle situations: I can't see shit!
It's very hard to focus on what enemies are where. I have no idea who i'm attacking most of the time
unless it's only a few targets.
This is a step backward compared to GW1.
I'll have to tinker with options menu, hopefully there's a solution.
 
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Drakortha

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If you're enjoying it so far then I would suggest digging into living story Season 1 when it makes a return this year, then play through Season 2 and Heart of Thorns expansion. It's the most interesting content in the game followed by Path of Fire. The core story and set-pieces are rather dated by comparison.
 

Drakortha

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into living story Season 1 when it makes a return this year

I thought you can already acess this again? I just started gw2 and find it fun so far but I still swap around profession to see what i like most

Nope you can't access it yet. It's getting a major re-work and will be returning this year.

Anyone new or returing needing some support in-game feel free to add me Buzzbugs.1236, send me a whisper.

I'll craft you some inventory bags with more space.
 
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alright, you tricked me into trying this again. i even went through the humiliating (for both) process of having to ask dinesh to change my account email instead of it being just a button. if basic bitches were a game, they'd probably be this one.
 
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Feb 3, 2022
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One good point of news is I got my ass kicked despite being level 80.
So balance isn't utterly destroyed by being 80.
I guess the perfect-gear level 80-tutorial land offers is misleading.

On the topic of My Story racial skills: I main a Charr, and during character creation you could pick a character who becomes your war buddy. One of the Charr elite skills is to call in members of their Warband. It would've been really cool if the character you picked as your buddy would be among the troops summoned. But that elite would also need to get tuned up for me to use it, as it is on a 4 minute cooldown and doesn't do much damage, whereas I can hit Strength of the Pack every minute and do a ton of damage.

One good point of news is I got my ass kicked despite being level 80.
So balance isn't utterly destroyed by being 80.
I guess the perfect-gear level 80-tutorial land offers is misleading.

Are you dying to generic HoT mobs? Or did you hang glide ontop of an elite dinosaur? HoT mobs were ridiculously overtuned at launch (had way too much HP and dealt way too much damage, fights dragged out for over a minute and if you got hit by one or two attacks you were a goner. Regular combat was too exhausting) and got nerfed. As long as you have a decent build, the only stuff that should be giving you trouble are elite mobs, champion mobs, and world bosses.

You need a combination of having the right skills and the right stat combination.
  • If you're just going to traditionally attack mobs and want to deal high damage, then get a set of berserker gear with runes of infiltration attached, as that will post power (raw damage), precision (crit chance), and ferocity (crit damage).
  • If you are playing a character who is using DoT abilities, then you want gear that has Condition stats (probably Rabid gear).
  • If you want a combination of survivability and raw damage, get a set of soldier's gear.
  • If you play a healer, get a set of minstrel's gear with monk, water, or magi runes, but beware that you will hit like a wet noodle so you shouldn't use this build for soloing.

If I understand it right, mastery points give you per zone advantages.

Some masteries affect more than just one zone. Hang gliding is useful anywhere. One of the vanilla mastery lines lets you auto loot and revive downed players faster. The Path of Fire expansion introduces mounts and levelling their masteries up is very useful.

For completing HoT's story, I believe the only masteries you need to level up is hang gliding. At HoT's launch, you also needed the poison mastery to beat the story, but it may have been made non-mandatory when the HoT rebalanced happened. Also, HoT masteries have the most grind. IIRC the amount of exp to earn them was massively nerfed. All of the masteries after HoT are considerably faster to earn.

The main issues remain.
The "unlock once and your done" approach with skills COMBINED with the basic bitch strategies ultimately offered by them
is a deathblow to the game's integrity.

I rather prefer the "unlock once and your done" approach of GW2 compared to the other MMOs. The devs generally only stick as much quality content into the game that they can think of, and don't try to pad out the length of the game with lesser quality filler that is really just wasting your time when you could be doing something else with your time.
 

TigerKnee

Arcane
Joined
Feb 24, 2012
Messages
1,920
One of the Charr elite skills is to call in members of their Warband. It would've been really cool if the character you picked as your buddy would be among the troops summoned. But that elite would also need to get tuned up for me to use it, as it is on a 4 minute cooldown and doesn't do much damage, whereas I can hit Strength of the Pack every minute and do a ton of damage.
The designers mentioned they intentionally lowball racial skills so that people don't feel compelled to pick "optimal" races but really in practice it means they're useless.
 

Cromwell

Arcane
Joined
Feb 16, 2013
Messages
5,443
The designers mentioned they intentionally lowball racial skills so that people don't feel compelled to pick "optimal" races but really in practice it means they're useless.

I used the artillery skill with my charr just to see what it does against some centaur, its a big aoe and not one of the rockets actually hit the target (I thought It auto aims the targets and does more damage as a result with fewer targets)
 

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