Verdict on Guild Wars 2's innovations

[Fencers]

Devs still have a ways to go till they give me the MMO I want

The nice thing about Guild Wars 2's "innovations", or better, concept iterations-- is that the game is popular.

As I said on page one, other MMOs had or have these concepts in part or combination. Sure we had/have games with downleveling, lateral progression and so on but the audience an EQ2, Fallen Earth or Asheron's Call reaches and influences these days is pretty small.

[sacrypheyes]

whether older MMOs had some of the feats before or not doesn't really matter, what matters in the end is how they put them together.
just like we use existing words to communicate (well, most of us do i hope), or how you use the very same basic components to make any electronic device.

[Dezerte]

The shared nature of mobs, resource nodes & etc is the biggest thing this game does right, I feel like I can no longer play any MMO that doesn't have this feature.

The combat & movement has that sluggish feeling, which makes combat less enjoyable. I'm also not a huge fan of locking whole skillsets to certain weapons, I've often found myself in a situation where I like a skillset, but I hate the looks of the weapon type (or the reverse).

With that said, I burned out on GW2 a few months in. One of my major annoyances has been their failure to fix spec-breaking bugs (I played a turret engineer), and from what I've heard, they still haven't fixed them.

[Deleted]

I had none of the problems others have had adjusting to this game after coming over from others. I guess it depends on the person and is NOT a negative of the game itself.
I also have no idea what people are talking about when they say the controls are clunky compared to WoW so again I think it has more to do with the individual and not the game.

Verdict? I'm still playing, still having fun. Tried going back to the other games (WoW, SWTOR) but have become absolutely spoiled by the ability to dodge attacks, move while casting and sharing mob's and nodes. That and the game is absolutely gorgeous with fantastic music. To each their own, this game is for me.

Same here, it isn't perfect but no game is anyway.

[Prag]

I like just about everything about it except the multiple guilds. Now, with Guild Missions and influence being so necessary for some reason, the moment I rep a guild another guild is whispering me asking me to rep it. I could just leave one but they sort of stretch over two time zones so one is always busy. It's just annoying.

[Karizee]

Colin Johanson gives insights into the thought processes of the Guild Wars 2 Development team during the 5 years the game was in production.

[Dabrix32]

Exp via crafting is fucking genius. Thats the only way to describe it. Having had around 15 max levels in WoW I HATE questing with a passion. Just being able to grind up to 30 and then get 5 crafts to 400 and easily hitting 80 is just WIN WIN WIN.

Scaling down but getting items and EXP for your actual level. Again fucking BRILLIANT. People in other games usually complain that they either only have 1 leveling route that they always have to take or they out level a lot of zones and never get to see them. This lets people go back and experience other race starting areas and still get rewards based on your level even if you are doing level 15 quests at level 70.

WvW. I miss the old days of RvR from DAoC and hoped this would be similar. So far its not even close. I love how they at least try to balance the 3 servers out so you dont just get curb stomped by a server full of elite guilds of 30-40 people all rolling around on Vent every single day. But travel SUCKS its just horrible trying to get around the maps unless you are a D/D Elementalist. DAoC had portals in EVERY keep you owned not just the main area where you enter. That allowed for fast travel if nearby keeps/towers were under siege. They also had boats for moving to enemy lands. Travel in WvW is like playing WoW when you didnt get a horse until 40 and there were only half the flight paths they have today. Pretty much this is how I spend my time in WvW zones: I see a battle icon and by the time I get there its over. Then another one pops up halfway across the map and again same thing. Also there is no reward for controlling the most stuff. Yes there are perks like crafting bonuses but DAoC had that and also Darkness Falls, which was the best place EVER. Give us a Dungeon, that isnt instanced, inside Eternal Battlegrounds and who ever controls the most stuff gets access to it. If you lose access wven though the enemy controls the dungeon you still have 10-15 mins to enter it so it would make for a great place to grind exp and gear and also be a place to PvP.

End Game. Its just pitifully non existent. They say there is no Holy trinity but thats a LIE. Basically unless you are a Warrior, Guardian, or a Mesmer you better have a guild or friends if you want groups for dungeons. My first 80 was a Ranger and no one wanted me. Also all the events on Orr are confusing. You never know when one is starting and by the time one does and someone shouts in region chat all the portal pads close to it are contested so you cant get to it. Id like more Meta Events for end game. Also Meta Events take WAY TOO LONG to restart. They should run every hour.

Classes. Still too many worthless skills and traits that just dont seem to mesh well together. Warrior seems like the only class that has traits that interact with other trait lines. Engineers to an extent have decent traits as well. But most other classes have terrible traits where the different lines dont really go well together. Minions are still broken. Ranger Pets at least do decent damage and have gotten some love but Necro minions are horrible.

Id give it a 6. I just didnt get that epic feeling while playing it. I think Rift did a FAR better job with Dynamic Events and they happen more often and give better rewards. Not to mention they actually have an End Game. But mostly because WvW was such a buzzkill because getting around sucks so bad. Also the one class build I wanted to play, Minionmancer, was broken and bugged worse than WoW at launch. Also if it wasnt for crafting I probably wouldnt have gotten any of my classes to 80. Also not having much to do at 80 gets boring fast. I can only run around Orr, do SPvP, or WvW for so long before I cant take it anymore.

[Korgoth]

Three things I feel GW2 did terribly wrong and shouldn't be taken as innovations and brought to other games...

1. Downed State is definitely moving in the wrong direction. It really takes the fun out of killing someone in PvP in a video game I wanted to play to kill people in PvP. When the health bar hits 0, THEY SHOULD FUCKING DIE.
2. Combat is definitely moving in the wrong direction. Binding abilities towards weapons, making them so few at 5, and then having AutoAttack be one of them! Then not having a real dps rotation or priority system, because oh yeah you only have a half dozen attacks. Then there is the whole stupidity of changing your weapon every 10-20s, wtf. Why? "Excuse me giant Norse dude while I stopped swinging at you with my massive 2h sword to pull out a hammer and shield, dont worry though after hitting 4 buttons I am switching back"...
3. Leveling system. No real PVE, level maxing in PvP, so wtf why have leveling at all. I cannot understand the point of leveling in GW2. It's like they started to step away from the WoW old school MMO model, but couldn't bring themselves to bring forward the back foot. So it felt really silly leveling.

Three things I felt were improvements:

1. The Map, holy fuck the map.
2. Fast Travel, using that map.
3. Overflow servers.

Three things I could take or leave:

1. No Trinity
2. No Factions
3. WvWvW and their poor excuse for instanced PvP.

[Arewn]

That's it, the most complex fight, boils down to "avoid voidzones" and kite/nuke adds. I've said it before, the complexity/hard part from WoW didn't come from the mechanics it was finding/managing good people.

Couldn't agree with this more. Individually, there's really nothing difficult about WoW's raids. It's getting 10/25 people to simultaneously not screw up for 10 minutes that is the real challenge.

[Meledelion]

Three things I feel GW2 did terribly wrong and shouldn't be taken as innovations and brought to other games...

1. Downed State is definitely moving in the wrong direction. It really takes the fun out of killing someone in PvP in a video game I wanted to play to kill people in PvP. When the health bar hits 0, THEY SHOULD FUCKING DIE.
2. Combat is definitely moving in the wrong direction. Binding abilities towards weapons, making them so few at 5, and then having AutoAttack be one of them! Then not having a real dps rotation or priority system, because oh yeah you only have a half dozen attacks. Then there is the whole stupidity of changing your weapon every 10-20s, wtf. Why? "Excuse me giant Norse dude while I stopped swinging at you with my massive 2h sword to pull out a hammer and shield, dont worry though after hitting 4 buttons I am switching back"...
3. Leveling system. No real PVE, level maxing in PvP, so wtf why have leveling at all. I cannot understand the point of leveling in GW2. It's like they started to step away from the WoW old school MMO model, but couldn't bring themselves to bring forward the back foot. So it felt really silly leveling.

1. I agree that downed state isn't in a good spot. Classes aren't balanced when downed at all which shouldn't happen, sadly I can't think of any solution so this means they should remove it.
2. There are real dps rotations, the fact that you don't know this is an error on your side not a-net's. Switching weapons isn't always the optimal route, for instance GS wars are better off not switching at all, same with SB ranger, thief,...
There may seem to be a lot less buttons to press than in WoW but in reality if you look at WoW's dps rotations there aren't a whole lot more.
3. At first GW2 didn't have levels but people didn't feel like they were accomplishing things so they put it in. I think the reason for this is that you can't look forward to things without levels. Lvl 10 I get traits and a utility skill, lvl 30 my elite, lvl 40 major traits, 60 master traits 80 max lvl. If you don't have levels people will get this "when will I get my elite?" feeling which is apparently off-setting.

[Constraint]

Dynamic Events? Great idea I guess. Didn't do a lot for me - they're almost all either AoE/mindlessly hit as many things as possible while staying alive (usually it's more or less impossible to die, depending on the event in question). Some of them were really well done. 6/10

No Holy Trinity? Woeful idea for mine. It sounded great when they were describing it butttt yeah. I couldn't even pretend to enjoy it in-game. I don't even see what the downside of the "holy trinity" is in the first place. It just... simplifies everything to the point of boredom, for me at least. And since I utterly adored healing in GW1, I'll have to give it a 1/10

Dodge system? Zzz. Sure, adds a bit of decision-making, but nothing amazing, especially in the way they implemented it. 6/10

Down-leveling? Meh. I'm sure it's actually pretty amazing for many - just not for me. I really couldn't care less about doing an extra dynamic event in a lowbie zone I'd missed upon reaching level cap, and I have no interest in helping lowbies level either, but for those who do - it's great. 7/10

Skills defined by weapons? Pretty good in concept. I'd prefer it if there were quite a few weapon-specific major skills and hundreds of other, non-weapon-based skills. I utterly ADORED the hundreds of skills concept from GW1. I loved finding them, unlocking them etc. Sure, most of them were fairly useless, but that's just a tuning issue. I was pretty devastated when I saw how few there are in GW2, and how effortless it is to unlock them all. 5/10

Combo fields? Again, good in concept, made next to no impact on me. Boring, just something you do if you can, don't if you can't. Lots of unused potential here. 3/10

Downed state? Whoever invented this concept is an imbecile. Enough said. 0/10

Multi-guild system? See directly above. 0/10

GW2s take on RvR? Arghhhh again, SO MUCH POTENTIAL ruined by dreadful, useless, stupid implementation. Play DAoC, come back, fix, end of. What a mess, 2/10

Skill and build system? Meh. I have rarely had as little pleasure leveling a character and unlocking skills as I did in GW2, besides possibly WoW in its current "rofl6talents" state. There isn't a great amount of room for customization, there're too few skills, too limited build diversity unless you particularly want to suck. 3/10

Cosmetic progression? Great for some, pointless for me. For some reason I never got bored for a second in GW1s cosmetic grind (full Obsidian/FoW armor on 4 chars pre-Factions) but GW2 armor doesn't catch my eye at all. Not sure what went wrong here. Still, I can't be too biased. 7/10 I guess. Being very generous.

I've rarely been so disappointed in a game in my life, which is saying quite a lot. D3 obviously takes the cake in recent years. I mean, seriously, I had more fun with WAR. Yeah, I said it.

[Elexo]

Big rant incoming!

I LOVED this game, played the crap out of it 24/7 for 3 months and for the most part it felt like an MMO finaly got it right!
The game felt smooth, fast, slick and new with interesting lore and soooo much content for a new MMO.
The world looked amazing, I remember entering the human capital city for the first time and my jaw dropped to the floor at the sheer magnitude of it all.
Dynamic events felt like a lot of fun, they really made the world feel more alive (though not quite as much as advertised).
But once all the newness wore off it seemed like a lot of great ideas and good intentions fell short and hurt the game more than they did good.


At first I loved the idea of no holy trinity but over time it became such a pain..
Every single fight became the big bad wolf encounter from Karazhan because of this system.
You're targetted? Pop defensive CDs, run away little girl and heal whenever it's off CD.

I understand I can't take direct hits from a massive construct or dragon directly but a lot of bosses were just champion versions of regular mobs/races, why could all of them 2/3 shot me despite it taking 5 of us 10 minutes to kill him/her?
Because of this I felt that my character was always weak, no matter what I would be fighting, if it would face me I'd better run away.

A long cooldown taunting system could've been put in place and stacking debuffs from the boss for at least a few fights would have been great.

I mean you'd be a Charr in full heavy armor and a tiny Sylvari wielding magical leaves would three shot you whilst you couldn't even put a dent in them.. wat?

Overall: Great idea, terrible excecution.

Other than that I also hated how streamlined the story felt despite giving you ''choices''.
Doesn't matter who or what you want your character to be, he's always going to be a incredibly good guy (Charr can be slightly greyish at worst)
Having no control over the thoughts, actions and morality of my own character in an RPG felt weak, especialy after it being many years since morality systems have been put in games.
Hell, despite it's many flaws at least SWTOR did this so much better.

Then there were the horribly long and drawn out dungeons that felt like you were back in Vanilla doing BRD over and over again..
They later added the rift dungeons (I forgot the name, sorry) which were soooo much better than the original dungeons that it was a shame they weren't in at the start.
And then that they were buggy as hell.
Worst of all was when you cleared 2.5 instances and then disconnected which meant everything you just did was thrown away and meant NOTHING anymore.


But what really BROKE the game for me were the words of the devolopers themselves.
Every minor patch was advertised to be the biggest thing since sliced bread, every minor change was said to be world shattering.
Which made every patch feel like a much bigger let down than they already would be.

[Deleted]

I forgot one thing when I posted earlier - no macros / no plugins, this is very good, I was watching someone raid in WoW earlier and the number of plugins were just beyond pathetic, they were beign told when spells were off cooldown, when the boss was doing his special attacks, when they were standing in something, stuff to help them heal, etc, why even play the game if you are going to get plugins to do it for you?

[Arrowstormen]

This thread is really good at making me depressed about a game I like, how do you do it?

[Deleted]

I forgot one thing when I posted earlier - no macros / no plugins, this is very good, I was watching someone raid in WoW earlier and the number of plugins were just beyond pathetic, they were beign told when spells were off cooldown, when the boss was doing his special attacks, when they were standing in something, stuff to help them heal, etc, why even play the game if you are going to get plugins to do it for you?

True that, and then they call it skill...

[draykorinee]

True that, and then they call it skill...

Great another wow hater dragging in a wow vs gw2 argument. Who gives a fuck what wow does stick to Gw2

[nevermore]

I forgot one thing when I posted earlier - no macros / no plugins, this is very good, I was watching someone raid in WoW earlier and the number of plugins were just beyond pathetic, they were beign told when spells were off cooldown, when the boss was doing his special attacks, when they were standing in something, stuff to help them heal, etc, why even play the game if you are going to get plugins to do it for you?

Because
1. WoW's standard UI is still quite pathetic
2. The raids, and especially heroics, are designed/tuned for people who use all the "general" addons (boss mods, threat meters, grid, etc)

When a heroic boss takes 500+ attempts to kill for a guild using all those addons, I don't even want to imagine what it would be like without.
Now I don't play WoW any more and I stopped hardcore raiding about 3 years ago (with a short relapse at MoP launch), but you have to give credit where it's due: they can make some boss fights so difficult it will make you bleed out of your ass.

I know we're not supposed to talk about that game here, but it just kinda grinds my gears (lol pun) when people say stuff like hurrrr wow raids are faceroll. They're clearly not, unless you've only done LFR and maybe a few normal modes.

Tennis is such a faceroll sport, I mean you just need to hit the ball to the other side of the net, no? Same argument.

[Deleted]

Great another wow hater dragging in a wow vs gw2 argument. Who gives a fuck what wow does stick to Gw2

Not trying to drag any argument, just calm down...

[draykorinee]

Not trying to drag any argument, just calm down...

Trying or not trying assanine comments like yours add nothing to this topic except baiting people like me to defend wows complexities. Bit silly to think you can call wow skilless and expect to avoid a vs debate.

[Karizee]

When a heroic boss takes 500+ attempts to kill for a guild using all those addons, I don't even want to imagine what it would be like without.
Now I don't play WoW any more and I stopped hardcore raiding about 3 years ago (with a short relapse at MoP launch), but you have to give credit where it's due: they can make some boss fights so difficult it will make you bleed out of your ass.

With 300+ H Ragnaros attempts under my belt I can assure you the reason it takes so many attempts is gear checks, nothing more nothing less. There is nothing reactionary, you learn your rotation and execute it in the same exact order every time. May as well be playing Simon - a version of Simon that is stuck on the same note sequence.