Guild Wars 2
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Guest, it's time once again for the massively important and exciting FoH Asshat Tournament!
Go here and give us your nominations!Who's been the biggest Asshat in the last year? Give us your worst ones!
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What's sad is that is exactly what their living story is. At least the few that I bothered looking at. It's a new zone with a 24/7 champ train going around doing all the stuff. You get all the achievements in ~2 hours while in a pile of particle effects. Then you're done and waiting for the next train.
Dynamic events is not exactly new, warhammer had public quests in certain areas, rift took it a step up and had random rift storms that had event chains that led to a boss finale, the storms would take over the map if left for too long. Gw2 made the events flow into different events to a conclusion event at some point and they fail/pass triggers but then cycle repeats when someone triggers the starting event again.
The funny thing about gw2 and progression is it's exactly like every other mmo from 1 to 80, then you hit 80 and end with exotics, but two months in anet decides they need one more level and make it into an insane grind to keep people busy. There are two ways they could have dealt with that, add in more levels but with smaller grinds like wow, or put that one long insane grind, which way would people have preferred?
The funny thing about gw2 and progression is it's exactly like every other mmo from 1 to 80, then you hit 80 and end with exotics, but two months in anet decides they need one more level and make it into an insane grind to keep people busy. There are two ways they could have dealt with that, add in more levels but with smaller grinds like wow, or put that one long insane grind, which way would people have preferred?
Mist
REEEEeyore
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Some of the events required a lot of spontaneous coordination if you wanted to get the full rewards each time. Escape from Lion's Arch, Scarlet Invasions, Twisted Marionette, those were some of the good ones, the ones where you couldn't just zerg if you wanted to win. They were still massive zone-wide battles, but everyone had a job to do.
For Escape from Lion's Arch, the ability to be in multiple guilds helped a lot. There were specific guilds formed to ferry like-minded people into the same instance of lion's arch and complete the objective in the allotted time.
For Escape from Lion's Arch, the ability to be in multiple guilds helped a lot. There were specific guilds formed to ferry like-minded people into the same instance of lion's arch and complete the objective in the allotted time.
I don't think I'm underestimating events - I think a lot of you guys are giving them too much credit. When you've got Colin making videos 2 years before launch about how rote and boring most MMO combat is, and how deep and actiony GW combat is, and it ends up not being that, you have to facepalm at the smarmyness of it all. Same for quests and hearts. It's fucking ridiculous to act like hearts or events are drastically different than anything wow has ever had - events are MARGINALLY different, much like war public quests which were mentioned, but they're way too predictable and stale - that system is good with work. Wow has that now since timeless isle came out because they see that that is a GOOD way to handle some stuff. GW2? Acts like hearts and events are factually superior to quests, and what I think has been shown is that a mix of all of these things where appropriate is ideal. The heart system was fucking stupid, there isn't a single heart in the game that amounts to more than 'run around and click F on things' or 'kill things in this area until full'. For Anet to act as though it's a revelation in how content is delivered is a joke, the act of picking up and turning in quests isn't the tedious part of old wow questing - it's the fact that every quest is kill 10 mobs or click on 10 things on the floor. Wow hasn't been that way in YEARS. Look at Wildstar, look at TSW, look at ESO. All of these games have a lot of VASTLY more interesting questing experiences than what ArenaNet would have you believe is the standard as of GW2's launch. WoW has quests that blow any GW2 scripted event out of the water for fun and creativity, and has since...Wrath of the Lich King? 6-7 years ago.
What you're left with in regards to Guild Wars that other games don't have:
No gearing - almost universally a negative.
No roles - seeing as their dungeon design is catastrophically incoherent due to this decision, absolutely a negative.
One Quest Line per Character - I put this rather than no quests, because the story quests are really neat. Too bad they only let you have the one since they won't let 'quests' bog down their game.
Hearts - strictly worse than quests. The only upside is not having to grab or turn them in, oh fucking no. Wildstar has remote turnins for quests, and I'd rather have some actual opportunity for unique gameplay or plots that don't revolve around something 12 people can do simultaneously that add up tedious tasks for a vendor reward. The content of these is worse than vanilla wow shit.
Events - Fine system, too bad either they're always the same repeating shit, or you don't have enough people around and they just constantly fail on the first stage or whatever. Could be a lot cooler - dragons are cool. Zerging around the zone for maximum efficiency is not. The content of these is largely boring also, same as hearts. There are some standouts.
Jumping puzzles - ain't nothin wrong with that!
Combat: VERY similar to classic tab target MMO, invincible dodge roll is stupid. Wildstar blows this aspect out of the water, and Secret World did largely the exact same setup at the exact same time - while having the rest of the game actually be good. VERY little depth due to the lack of resource systems - WoW is actually harder to be good at by a longshot, tab target or no.
Living Story - Never adds anything but grindy bullshit, VERY rarely something cool comes in (the bazaar and sanctum sprint were neat). Yes, since you insist on comparing to wow, wow has come out with an entire fucking expansion since GW2 launched, and like 4 patches since. Has siege of orgrimmar sat still for a year? yup. That shit sucks. Know what sucks more? GW2's living story updates.
Mist
REEEEeyore
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They realized that hearts blow, thats why none of the new zones have hearts.
Disagree on combat. If you don't think GW2 had very good combat, you weren't very good at it. It took people a while to get good at the combat system, so judging by shit at launch doesn't do the combat system justice.
Disagree on combat. If you don't think GW2 had very good combat, you weren't very good at it. It took people a while to get good at the combat system, so judging by shit at launch doesn't do the combat system justice.
lol? Very good at it? The only limiting factor on what you can do are cooldowns, there is literally 0 depth to the game. There's depth to making builds and gearing perhaps, but actually playing a character? involves appropriately blinding/ccing/otherwise juking attacks, dodging, healing. Shit is nothing fancy at all.
That's just not right. Gearing and speccing are not really hard. (I may be biased as I just spent two hours trying make a Secret World Spec.) Attacking in the most recent parts of the game is all about fast movement, well times dodges, saving your heals for when you need them, purging stuff off of yourself and might stacking. What makes GW2 really great is how much movement you need and how responsive the keys are. There is no game as good at it at all.
Unless you have played later fractals, the two new raids, the arena parts of the queens pavillion and of course the wonderful marionette, then you have not really played the combat system as it's developed.
Hearts >>>> Quests in my opinion. The less clicking and collecting "!"s I have to do the better. I like going across the map doing shit and not have to worry about shit. I think the combat in GW2 was very well done, better than Wildstar imo. I agree with the rest though.
I liked hearts better than traditional quests because you could complete them in multiple ways usually. That having been said, I thought that they were the most traditional and WoWlike of all the leveling paths (excerpting maybe just killing/farming stuff but no one uses that method as far as I have seen).
I liked exploration giving huge chunks of exp including zone completion. I liked events giving exp and giving other currencies you need. The big zone chains in particular are very fun. I love jumping puzzles and have them all done multiple times including the first version of clock tower. Obsidian Sanctum with a handful of people can be a HUGE blast (its a Realm v Realm Jumping Puzzle).
I am not a huge fan of many of the living world chunks but many I liked. Fractals are terrific. I enjoyed WvW but think it's too much of a repetitive zerg for me to stay with it now. I enjoy the combat but the current meta of all dps gear and all might stacking annoys me as I don't like to play that way all the time myself. It's one of the reasons I like fractals because of all the built in roles that are not just killing stuff.
The everyone can join open world zerg fests are fun the first few times you do them and then they are boring. The generic nature of 99.9 percent of all rewards is dumb and it's the biggest factor in people leaving that I know.
The lack of real solid guild level challenging content annoys most ubers who like that sort of thing.
Basically, I came for the exploration and stayed for the Fractal Dungeons, Jumping puzzles and the good Living Story updates.
I
Ukerric
Bearded Ape
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Remember those quests parodied (until MoP): Kill me 10 Renowned Paladins. Nope, the Experienced ones next to them don't count. Now that you've killed 10 Renowned, go kill 12 Experi... what? You already did? Don't care, it's kill them now, not then.
Hearts offer a vastly better system: do I kill some wildlife? Light those torches to secure the path? Rez those guards? Grab those items? Whatever, it all counts. That's because Hearts aren't quests. What they correspond to in WoW-esque form is factions. Yep. Do whatever stuff you prefer (slaughter wildlife, wear tabard in dungeons, turn in items), get faction, unlock faction vendor. Sure, you don't have to grind 80 days of dailies to complete the faction, it's done in 10mn. So what?
Hearts are strictly superior to 'kill 10 bears' yes, too bad this isn't 2004. Wow quest design hasn't involved that as a linchpin in years. Every MMO has some amount of that kind of shit, but the simple truth is even burning crusade had SOME quests that were more interesting (bombing runs and shit when they were the hotness) that hearts do absolutely nothing to address. It doesn't matter if the heart 'system' is marginally superior at bear ass quests when the goal shouldn't be to make the bear ass quest better but to make it not exist at all.
On the flipside, Cool quests like shiphands in wildstar, turning into a giant to punt deathwing in wow, that shit is completely undoable with the heart system. All of the VERY BEST kinds of quests simply do not function in GW2's setup, which is a fucking shame. The simple act of right clicking an NPC was NEVER the bad part of quests, the part where you slaughter meaningless shit for 1% of a quest progress at a time was. Good thing GW2 brought over that fine aspect! For every heart you find me in GW2 that isn't advanced by hitting F on something or killing shit for progress, I'll show you 25 wow quests that are imaginative and different than just picking things up or killing mobs. It's that fucking sad how bad hearts are. (I can literally only think of one, and I did them all. That's the stupid 'robot chess' one in the newbie zone for the Asura).
Draegan: combat..I don't even. It's literally impossible to think that combat in GW2 is superior to Wildstar. I mean they're SO similar in design with one having strictly functionally superior execution. It's like saying FF14 combat is better than wow or something - they might as well be the same, but one has a longer GCD and shitty animation delays and stuff. GW2 claims action combat but the only action it really involves is using invincible rolling and otherwise running bosses around like retards in dungeons while you aggro swap them back and forth.
Spoken with complete ignorance as expected.
Edit: Ok I'll bite a little harder. GW2 is 'action combat' where fireballs chase you unless you dodge roll at the last moment, where by default the game still tab targets things you hit and auto-faces them (you have to actually change settings to even be able to just 'swing' at nothing and correctly arc your shit), and the only way that you actually manage to prevent boss attacks is by utilizing your invincible rolling or debuffing the mobs so they arbitrarily 'miss' you on their next swing or shit like that. The 'combo' system is stupid as fuck, OH BOY I SHOT MY ATTACK THROUGH THE MAGIC PUZZLE TEXTURED BLOB OF SHIT AND DID SOME FIRE DAMAGE!. Fucking deep bro. I have no resource to manage so I mash my best attack on CD and when it's on cooldown I just mash the other attacks, maybe keep up a bleed or something, fucking joyous.
Compared to wildstar, where my attacks actually have varied and interesting attack patterns, and there is 0 'tab' or sticky use of abilities, I HAVE to aim my shit and hit something with it, or lots of somethings. Mobs still autoattack, true, if they didn't healers wouldn't have anything to do, I also have a dodge roll, but it doesn't make me invincible, it just helps to avoid stuff better that I can already avoid because it's painted on the floor, fireballs don't home in on me, I deftly sidestep them. Mobs don't just plink arrows at you and you hit 'blind' to avoid them, they kneecap you to snare you and then try to hit you with deadly one shots that you have to circle around them while snared to avoid. Instead of jumping onto a puzzle field to AE BLIND the mobs, my group and I coordinate strings of up to 12 interrupts/stuns/blinds/disarms to prevent enemy casts or tank deaths, where we actually rely on each other because if we don't we have to avoid some complete rapetrain AE.
The irony is, while both are 'action' combat, GW2 relies MORE heavily on unavoidable auto-attack damage from mobs, and less on avoidable action-like maneuvers than Wildstar, and Wildstar HEAVILY relies upon the avoidable actiony stuff. GW2 though, is the game without healers - in a game without healers they could just as conceivably make there be NO unavoidable damage, and let you actually skill your way through content and it wouldn't break anything - wildstar actually needs autoattacks or the healers wouldn't have shit to do a lot of the time if you were good enough. I mean the two games combat systems are very much cut from the same cloth, to not recognize that fact is to be willfully ignorant (or hopelessly inept), but Wildstar takes the 'action' aspect several notches farther than GW2 and is better for it. It has LESS in common with wow than GW2, not more (at least as far as combat mechanics are concerned).
Zindan
Bronze Baronet of the Realm
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And both games fail to have better combat than Tera. I'll agree that WS combat is a step up from GW2, but not by as much as you suggest. I -strongly- dislike how mobs in WS will -always- hit you with their autoattacks while you are in range, nothing you can do will make those attacks miss. That is cheesy, imo.
I think it's cheesy in GW2, in Wildstar it's completely necessary due to having the trinity.
Ukerric
Bearded Ape
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And we all know why the Heart system exists. Because, at one point, someone in design became afraid that "players may not know what to do! How do we give them something to do?".
The answer in WoW is the yellow "!" sign, and being told explicitly "go there now" (and, in various expansion, being absolutely unable to go there until told. I'm looking at you, Cataclysm). The answer in GW2 is "look at your map, and find a heart that's empty".
Yep. Because that shit is done in your Personal Story. You know, the thing that has a real quest journal, tells a story in which YOU are the hero, yadda, yadda? In which you follow a story, just like the WoW quest lines? Where you infiltrate a Dredge city disguised in a Mining Suit, try to keep alive the defenders against a massive onslaught of undead on Claw Island off Lion City, etc? You see, those kind of things exist in GW2. Just not on the map, in an instance.