My BIG LIST of things that SUCK about Guild Wars

[Volourn]

"The game doesn't remember spells or chat settings between areas."

That's retarded. The only thing that should matter with this is spell duration. Lame.


"You can have gobs of skills, but you can only select eight of them at any given time - and you can only swap them in a town."

Gah. That's more retarded. Why allow palyers to choose skkills if youa re gonna limit them anyways? Lame. If I learn healing spells; I should have access to them always. This is so FFish. It works in FF; but meh.


And, no, Proto, these arne't minor these things.


That said, SP, you compared it saying it was like the combat system in NWN; THAT'S a positive thing as far as I'm concerned.

 

[jiujitsu]

No.. No it isn't.

 

[Antagonist]

The frequency in which monsters drop loot has increased steadily over the last two betas and now we are approaching Diablo 2 levels.

This is totally annoying because you don't have begs in the tutorial areas and the chest in which you can store items is not available to you either. So you can either leave stuff where it drops or you can return every five minutes to the town to sell the junk which totally sucks because unlike Diablo 2 there are no town portals which enable you to return to your former location immediatly. Oh, and if you break up items to get crafting material your inventory fills up quicker than you can watch.

Major backstep compared to the early betas where you would only get few items per area that had actually some meaning.

 

[Volourn]

"No.. No it isn't."

It is to me. :D

 

[Shagnak]

The mobs with healers can be a problem, but it's just a challenge you have to overcome. Tactics and all that.

Bullshit. You have two Charr Martyrs with a boss Charr Martyr, all healing one another, you don't need tactics, you need massive damage or a counterspell. If you don't have either, you're screwed.

I have struck situations like this, and changing tactics mid-combat has often been a "good idea". If repeatedly striking a combat problem like this, then perhaps going back to a town/hub and thinking out your strategy a bit better would also be a "good idea". Just changing the skill set you go on the road with can make a difference.
I have yet to find an insurmountable encounter. Some take a little more effort, and more than one go, is all. Sounds to me like you're being punished for being crap, and having a whiney-fit because you're not used to it.

You cast a buff on someone, then change areas, you have to recast.

Yes, this is weird, but changing areas resets some significant things. If your henchmen are wasted, for example, just high-tail outta there and into the next area to get them back.
On the face of it that might be silly in itself, but due to your moaning about difficulty maybe it's a good thing. Guess you want your cake and eat it too, eh? No biggy, really.
Still, yes, it would make more sense if your "buff" lasted between areas.

It also doesn't remember the channel you were currently typing in, so if you're talking to the guild channel and switch areas, you have to use the hotkey again for guild talk.

Yeah, this annoys me. But with the small patches that have already auto-dloaded, I wouldn't be surprised if this gets fixed reasonably soon. I don't think it's a huge problem, really, but it is a valid annoyance.

Players and NPCs have HUGE ASS clip boxes and you can't walk through them.

I haven't really noticed this. And I have walked through players in town areas, and even overlapped them for long periods of time (while getting coffee!), so I figure you're full of shit on this one.
If you are meaning only adventure areas, I have had a henchman get "hooked" behind a road-sign though. Just walking back to collect the individual fixed that.
Haven't had quest-killing issues with this yet, I guess you're just extremely unlucky, right?

The character system sucks balls. Don't care what Penny Ante says. You can have gobs of skills, but you can only select eight of them at any given time - and you can only swap them in a town.

Yes, this is designed to force you into thinking of a strategy. It reduces the more brainless sort of munchkinism and so on. It forces you to think about what you are going to equip, and how to complement the other players. This can be a good thing.
(Edit: yes, I have moaned about this myself though :wink:. Just two more slots to make up for the "pet" skills I always have equipped would be nice )

Now, you get skills by doing quests, but like I said, it's a deck of card style deal. There is no real "building" of characters. It's more about doing quests and getting new cards.

You also get skill-points for some quests. These can be 'spent' at skill-trainers to buy new skills.

if you're looking to up a skill past a certain point, you're basically going to have to level a few times before you can raise it.

I don't know if this is a complaint or not.
(a) You are actually talking about "attributes" by the way. Read the manual.
(b) Making it harder to raise high attrbutes is a good thing. It's called "balance".

There really are no attributes to raise.

You really should read that shiny manual thing that came with your game.
Page 9 - Attribute Points Allocation
Pages 10-20 - the attributes of each profession

Need more mana? Too fucking bad, you just get the basic level up raise. In nearly all other action RPGs, you can raise an attribute to help you out there. Not here, though! You just get the five skill points.

The world is abundant with items to raise your base Energy. Some items improve energy regen, and some skills do too. Some skills and attributes reduce Energy cost. For example, the Ranger's Expertise attribute. Some spells vampiracly drain energy.
Not being able to have uber amounts of Energy is due, once again, to balance.

The inventory interface sucks. It's about 80% of the vertical height of your screen, and two thirds of that is taken up by your paperdoll. Meanwhile, the important part of the inventory is reduced to itty bitty little icons at the very bottom. You have to mouse over the stuff in there to tell a lot of stuff apart because it's so tiny. Do I have six shells or are those fetid carapaces? Is that a long bow or a flat bow or.. ? But hey, at least your paperdoll is fucking huge!

Man, that's picky.
I have no issues here. I'll leave it at that.
[Edit: no I won't. Its about 50% length on my screen. And the icons are plenty big enuff. Are you playing on an itty-bitty screen?]

It's also rather clumsy, especially when you have to identify or salvage something that's in another pouch. The only way to do this I've found is to drag that item to the pouch where the salvage kit or identify kit is. If that pack is full, you have to drag something out, then drag that one thing in.

Once again, your inability to "try shit out" is being displayed. Double-click on your kit, hovering (or right clicking) on the tab for the other container will open that container. Then click on the item you want to identify or salvage.
Geeeezzzzuusss.

Which means that any 9th level Ranger/Warrior is the same as any other 9th level Ranger/Warrior as long as they've done the same quests. That's not a good thing, that's a BAD thing.

In most modern ARPGs, you have different builds of the same class because there are gobs of options towards building them. In Guild Wars, you have X-number of skill points you're free to shuffle around, and all skills are given by quests and skills can be shuffled around the same way. It makes everything generic with the only difference between two characters of the same class being what secondary class they've chosen. Lame.

If they have done exactly the same quests and have access to exactly the same professions and have put in exactly the same points in to exactly the same attributes and equippied exactly the same items and equipped exactly the same skill-set before going questing...then yes, barring appearance (which could be conceivably exactly the same as well, I guess)...they will be exactly the same.
Hah!

 

[Shagnak]

Actually they really fixed that up since beta. You haven't been playing the missions so you don't know what the new Rurik is like. He actually follows you now instead of going ahead without you.

Apparently not. There was discussion on it last night.

Yeah, this bit hasn't been entirely fixed yet. Most of the time he waits, but at key moments he would race ahead into conflict, while you were still involved in another skirmish.
I hope they tighten this up soon, as its not the only "npc escort" mission, and I expect there are several othes I have not done yet.
In saying that, I've only failed the once.

 

[protobob]

"The game doesn't remember spells or chat settings between areas."

That's retarded. The only thing that should matter with this is spell duration. Lame.

It's not as big of an issue as Saint makes it out. 1) skills don't last long and 2) zoning doesn't happen often. Zoning is a bit gamey, think diablo not an mmorpg.

"You can have gobs of skills, but you can only select eight of them at any given time - and you can only swap them in a town."

Gah. That's more retarded. Why allow palyers to choose skkills if youa re gonna limit them anyways? Lame. If I learn healing spells; I should have access to them always. This is so FFish. It works in FF; but meh.

Each character will eventually have up to 150 skills, all of which do different things. You pick 8 which work well together between missions/questing/pvp and go do your thing.

The FFish thing (I'm thinkng Final Fantasy 8) is that to get Elite Skills you have to Capture them from certain Bosses that use them.

I don't think this stuff is retarded, it's just different. Personally I think it's cool.

But feel free to be a knee-jerk-reactionary-who-doesn't-know-what-they-are-talking-about etc.

 

[Shagnak]

Firstly, apologies for the multi-posts.
I've had 3.5 hours of sleep and I'm running on empty...

The map sucks. There's no listing of much of anything on the map other than red, green, and blue blips for the compass and town locations for the big map. Where's the names of areas? Where's the icons on the compass map to tell you which green blips are merchants versus the other green blips that are just meaningless townspeople or hirelings? Where's a special indicator for NPCs that are giving out quests at least?

The world ("travel") map could be better. I would like the names of regions for example, perhaps after you have explored a significant portion of it.
As for the green "blips", there are usually not enough to make things confusing. If your short term memory cant remember that those four over there standing in a row are hirelings, and that one wandering around up there by himself is old mad wotshisface who gave you that mission, well, I don't know what to say.
A "special indicator" for "quest-givers" would be useful. But I have yet to find it difficult to approach someone and see the big fuck-offgreen exclamation mark hovering above their head. Hell, in a lot of rpgs you don't even get that.

The world is a maze. It really is. Navigating around the world is a pain, especially the first time you move through an area.

This is called "exploring". I like the landscape and what they have done with it. Some of it is more twisty-turny than others, the second time through the same area the problem (not that it is) doesn't exist.

It's not always the case of a consistant steepness of hill being impassable.

Haven't really noticed this...its always been kinda obvious to me, or maybe I just haven't found it frustrating enuff yet for it to impinge on my consciousness.
Has anyone else noticed this?

The missions are totally gay.

Haha, yep. I'm not a big fan of the mission length. Sometimes I just want to "dip in" for 20 minutes, and I usually find that missions take longer than that. I reckon some of them should be made smaller, or even be divided up where there are intra-mission "stages".

Crafting is lame. It's lame because you can't do it. You have to pay to have it done by NPCs! You have to salvage items you find in order to get components, right? Then you have to pay NPCs to make new items for you. So, not only do you have to buy salvage kits to break items down, and they only have a limited amount of uses, but you also get to pay more money to have the new items made. I haven't seen anyone sell armor, either. I haven't seen any armor drop yet, other than shields. So far, if you want armor, you have to salvage and pay to have it made. Well, you can also buy components from certain merchants, but that costs a lot more.

No, crafting is great.
Perhaps they could add in some cheapo crappy sold armour, but I think the idea is that decent armour needs to be made for the wearer.
I think the whole system works fine, and is better than mister uber-orc dropping his plate +3 that somehow fits your svelte elf.
[Edit: just read one of your responses before, re: why can't the player craft? If they can make the refined materials (from the raw ones), why can't they make the final product?
Good point. But not good enuff to make the whole system suck in my opinion. I guess they had to plant their stick in the sand somewhere, and enabling you to refine stuff (e.g. remove some sheets of plate from some armour) is less of a stretch than allowing you to make some uber armour.
I dunno. It works as it is.]

Death penalty fun. When you die, you have consequences, naturally. However, Guild Wars' idea of consequences is you get less mana and hit points until you kill enough creatures that your morale makes up for it. The penalty is pretty steep, too.

...but is definitely less of a penalty than just dying and reloading.
And the penalty is reset when you give up on the mission and/or go back to a town/hub.
I think the morale sysytem works wonderfully. It builds up when you are doing well, it penalises you when something traumatic happens - such as dying. And you get a chance to work it off. Fuck, I don't know what there is to moan about there.

No way to replace people who leave the party.

Yes, it would be nice to have some sort of hench-person stand-in "beam in". Agreed.

 

[Volourn]

"Each character will eventually have up to 150 skills, all of which do different things. You pick 8 which work well together between missions/questing/pvp and go do your thing."

That's simply dumb. If my character has a skill; I should *always* have access to it. Period.

Still, other than some of the problems mentioned, I think GW might be a worthy purchase. However, you suck at advertising.

 

[Sol Invictus]

There's about five character classes and 75 skills each, and all the classes can be combined with eachother, two per character. So the variety is incredible.

SIX! Warrior, Monk, Mesmer, Elementalist, Necromancer, Ranger.

 

[Sol Invictus]

Bullshit. You have two Charr Martyrs with a boss Charr Martyr, all healing one another, you don't need tactics, you need massive damage or a counterspell. If you don't have either, you're screwed.

I believe that's the point. In most games, damage overcomes everything, hence the term "min/max" or "powerclass". In Guild Wars, you sometimes have to carry skills that you wouldn't normally use 24/7. For instance, I always use Conjure Phantasm and Phantom Pain for damage, but when I'm up against a monk, they're completely useless because it doesn't disable him from healing himself. My method is to drain him and any other casters completely of mana - which is of course useless against warriors and rangers, so that's where my various hexes come in. If they're hexed, and the monk doesn't have the mana to help them out, the party is screwed.

The character system sucks balls. Don't care what Penny Ante says. You can have gobs of skills, but you can only select eight of them at any given time - and you can only swap them in a town. If you're on a mission or in a hostile area(which is everything BUT a town), you're stuck with those eight skills. Basically, because of that, it's like NWN's combat meets Etherlords, where skills are the current card deck you have on hand.

Now, you get skills by doing quests, but like I said, it's a deck of card style deal. There is no real "building" of characters. It's more about doing quests and getting new cards.

At level up, you get five skill points. Skills basically determine what level of "card" you can use and modifies the attack a bit. Raising skills is weighted as well. So, if you're looking to up a skill past a certain point, you're basically going to have to level a few times before you can raise it.

There really are no attributes to raise. Need more mana? Too fucking bad, you just get the basic level up raise. In nearly all other action RPGs, you can raise an attribute to help you out there. Not here, though! You just get the five skill points.

What's wrong with that? How much fun would a game be if the only skills consisted of "Fireball Level 1" to "Fireball Level 10"?

Again, min/maxing is a bunch of boring/powerlevelling shit that should stay in EQ and WOW. There's always an ultimate min/maxed build in WOW and EQ that nothing else can beat, based on the statistics alone. End result? Everyone's a generic character. Not so with Guild Wars - everyone has a different set of skills that allow them to play differently. Sure, some people have the 'idea' that they can min/max their characters, such as the "KOR" team during Beta, who whooped a lot of ass, but as soon as someone found out what their team build was, and figured out a counter, their streak ended.

No min/maxing in this game.

 

[fnordcircle]

Pressing a button corresponding to a skill and waiting for it to recycle? What a unique and not at all typical MMORPG concept!

I expect to buy this game at some point and I'm hopeful I'll enjoy it but so far I still think a lot of you are deluding yourselves into thinking that the biggest feature is something other than the lack of a monthly fee. I played one of the beta weekends and found it to be meh.

 

[Sol Invictus]

It's also rather clumsy, especially when you have to identify or salvage something that's in another pouch. The only way to do this I've found is to drag that item to the pouch where the salvage kit or identify kit is. If that pack is full, you have to drag something out, then drag that one thing in.

Wrong. There are two ways of dealing with this:

1) After cliicking the identify or salvage kit, hover over the bag and after a second it'll open up.

2) Press F9 to open up all your bags concurrently.

 

[Sol Invictus]

"The game doesn't remember spells or chat settings between areas."

That's retarded. The only thing that should matter with this is spell duration. Lame.

As a previous poster said, it's closer to Diablo, and zoning doesn't happen often. Also, does it really matter? Spells only last 30-120 seconds, and mana refills in less than 10 seconds.

This is not Everquest where you have to sit for 10 minutes to refill.

No way to replace people who leave the party.

Biggest problem in the game. I've suggested a billion times that they should implement henchmen to replace dropped players.

 

[Sol Invictus]

"Each character will eventually have up to 150 skills, all of which do different things. You pick 8 which work well together between missions/questing/pvp and go do your thing."

That's simply dumb. If my character has a skill; I should *always* have access to it. Period.

Still, other than some of the problems mentioned, I think GW might be a worthy purchase. However, you suck at advertising.

That's not dumb, it's how the game works. It's abstract- just like turn based isn't 'realistic' but hey, it works for games like X-Com, Jagged Alliance 2 and yes, Fallout. So why "should" you have access to your skills all the time? Because it's like that in most other games? That's a weak argument. This is just how the game works, and how skills are implemented for purposes of balance. I'd imagine that if they implemented on-the-fly changing of skills, the game wouldn't be much of a challenge at all, especially PVP, because players would be swapping between 3-4 decks in order to deal with opponents, and the game would become a challenge of "who can swap the decks fastest" rather than an actual game of skill.

 

[Naked_Lunch]

You forgot to add "QED, bitch!"

 

[Jedi359]

I don't know much about the game, but from what I'm hearing, it sounds like it would frustrate me to make spend 45minutes working my way through a dungeon, only to find out that I have to start over just because I don't have the right skill to finish it. At least, that's what it sounds like to me.

I was mildly curious about this game, to the point where I might have found someone who owns it and checked it out, but this review has totally put me off.

That's not dumb, it's how the game works. It's abstract- just like turn based isn't 'realistic' but hey, it works for games like X-Com, Jagged Alliance 2 and yes, Fallout.

1. That first sentence made me laugh. If I made a game where the player's character dies every 5 minutes, can I claim that's not a stupid choice because it's just "How the game works?"

2. You're commiting a falacy here, though I forget the name. You're essentially saying "Turn Based games are not realistic, but some of them are fun. Therefore all things that are not realistic are fun."

o why "should" you have access to your skills all the time? Because it's like that in most other games? That's a weak argument. This is just how the game works, and how skills are implemented for purposes of balance. I'd imagine that if they implemented on-the-fly changing of skills, the game wouldn't be much of a challenge at all, especially PVP, because players would be swapping between 3-4 decks in order to deal with opponents, and the game would become a challenge of "who can swap the decks fastest" rather than an actual game of skill.

I don't see how picking 8 skills and hoping they're the right ones makes this a game of skill.

 

[Human Shield]

You pick skills that work with each other well. Any skill that an enemy uses is also a player skill and there are only 6 classes, and monsters don't have secondaries.

So you will come into contact with:

Warriors (uses melee weapons)
Rangers (uses bows)
Healers (uses healing)
Mesmers (uses hexes)
Necromancers (uses hexes)
Elementalists (uses damage spells)

On any mission or area you will fight a mix of these 6.

You design your 8 skills to deal with these 6 classes with different degrees of effectiveness. You can usually design your skills to deal with 3 alright or up to one really well.

With a balanced party you can deal with anything. If you fight with 4 warriors you can get stuck, if you fight with 4 elementalists you can get stuck.

If you pick the right henchmen to compliment your skills you can deal with stuff. If you are a warrior, taking the warrior henchman will waste the slot. It is designed to support a balanced party.

The more skills you get the better combos you can create to deal with certain classes better or deal with more stituations.

The missions are pretty short and enjoyable, you don't get much out of them except a new map point so they are made to be fun. You will stuck if you don't have a balanced party, not if you pick the wrong skill.

 

[Jedi359]

Does it not bother you that there are only six basic enemy types?

Also, the missions would have to be pretty damn entertaining if you aren't really rewarded for them in any tangible way.

Also, if the importance is in building a good group, how is soloing viable?

 

[Shagnak]

Also, the missions would have to be pretty damn entertaining if you aren't really rewarded for them in any tangible way.

You get experience and skill points for finishing the mission, loot (gold and items) and experience from killing enemies etc.

Also, if the importance is in building a good group, how is soloing viable?

Hire computer-controlled henchmen. Though "real people" are often better, as Sol has pointed out in the past.

 

[Mr. Hand]

Umm might be abit of topic but since this is the active thread on GW ill go with it.
Just a question I pose to those who are playing the game: are there |33t itAmZ to collect in the game? Ie Windforce, SoJ-alikes in the game?

 

[PennyAnte]

Does it not bother you that there are only six basic enemy types?

There are six basic enemy types but they are all using different mixes of roughly 75 skills. There's way more combat variety than in any other game I've played. Even compared to a shooter like Halo, in a sense.

@ Mr. Hand, there's some very rare crafting material required for the best armor and so forth. So there's an element of it. There also are very high quality drops, so you can get gear far better than the average stuff.

 

[almondblight]

2. You're commiting a falacy here, though I forget the name. You're essentially saying "Turn Based games are not realistic, but some of them are fun. Therefore all things that are not realistic are fun."

No, it's a sound syllogism. If all unrealistic = crap, and all turn based = unrealistic, then all turn based = crap. If turn based is not always crap, but is always unrealistic, then being unrealistic doesn't necessitate something is crap (even if only for this one case).

 

[Volourn]

Swapping skills being dumb has very little to do with realism. It has to do with fun, and buidling a character. I think it's dumb, for exmaple, to be able to chioose to have say riding as a skill yet not be able to use it because it's swapped out. Do the characters have temproary amnesia? I mean, R00fles! That's a major weakness of the game no matter how many fanboys come to defend it!

 

[Sol Invictus]

You must really hate Magic the Gathering, then.