First Impressions

[Kageru]

I believe the plan is that level gain is linear so level 10 and level 70 should take about the same amount of time.

This game is stroking my explorer interest big-time. I'll even run rather than port sometimes because of the chance of finding a new hidden sight, picking up some more craft materials and maybe an event that is new or was fun the first time. And all of it gives me XP and level appropriate loot. I'm way out-levelled for the zone I'm in just from dicking around.

That and the Norn zone is just beautiful.

[ffc]

Ok, I think half of the coolest shit about this game is hidden.

My guildmate accidentally came to a cave not near any waypoint or POI.  I met up with him and we checked it out.

Was there any other indication that a cave was there, like a road ending near it or a blurry cave on the world map? I have been finding lots of tunnels connecting areas and underground spots that I can make out on the map in hindsight but finding it the first time is total luck. The explorer in me loves it while the OCD in me hates it.

[Ingmar]

The first dungeon, is the worst first dungeon I can remember doing in an MMO.

[Zetor]

The first dungeon, is the worst first dungeon I can remember doing in an MMO.

WAR still holds that dubious trophy for me.

[Ingmar]

It might win for me if I had ever made it to a dungeon in WAR, yeah.

[kildorn]

AC is pretty bad, from a "here's entirely new mechanics, and overly busy design, no real guidance on what you're supposed to be doing, and totally bullshit mobs like rangers with remote trapping"

I really wish they would have used something else as the starter dungeon, because AC can quickly devolve into death zerging in a pickup. Ingmar's run was actually really clean. We wiped on a trash pack once, and wound up death zerging the end boss due to being down a player. Otherwise not too bad as AC runs go.

I still think Twilight Arbor is a far easier instance though, bullshit necromancer fight and all.

[Zetor]

Yea, I've run two instances so far (both full pugs) - AC and Caduceus' Mansion. AC is pretty rough at times (dat trash!), and the group fell apart on the trash pull with 3 rangers after the first "real" boss (when the king's ghost pops up to taunt you). It requires a lot of kiting and is generally way too hard for a normal-mode dungeon. They need to retune that shit.

OTOH Caduceus was pretty standard - simple/straightforward bosses, manageable damage, and no tricks - the entire run was just around 30 minutes. If anything, that should be the starter dungeon.


e: and with all that, AC was STILL more enjoyable than WAR/ChampO/AOC's first dungeons and wasn't too far behind the horrible slogfest that was oldFornost in LOTRO. That's pretty much damning with faint praise, btw. :p

[Ingmar]

The problems with group PVE, as I see them (most of these apply to Group Events as well as the dungeon I ran):

- Melee gets destroyed in every boss fight I've seen, and a lot of the trash. There's seemingly no good reason to even try to melee in group PVE.
- The game is so overly busy with ground effects that it can become completely impossible to see the things you're supposed to move out of.
- The lack of roles, preponderance of ground effects, and spazzy, uncontrollable aggro, leads to every fight, boss and trash alike, being everyone kiting around in a circle trying not to die.
- Trap rooms are a stupid pixel hunt combined with hard-to-see don't-step-here-or-die circles. Whee.
- Graveyard rushing is stupid, and if that's the safety valve against something being too hard in your game design, your game design has failed.

With AC specifically it also suffers from being pretty ugly (and with colors that punish the color blind - yay extremely faint red trap circles on brown ground) and having a really unexciting story, ntro dungeons in other games are designed to grab you (Deadmines, Esseles/Black Talon, Polaris, etc.) And the strategy so far seems to boil down to what you'd expect from a group of 5 dpsers trying to do a heroic in WoW.

There may be a better system than the trinity out there to be designed for this kind of content, but this is emphatically not it.

EDIT: And don't get me started on the 20 minutes of hoops we had to jump through just to get everyone able to actually zone into the dungeon together. You'd think a studio who's prior game was 99% instanced, would have an idea about how to get instances to work cleanly.

[Kageru]

I don't think that's really it. This is the future direction of MMO's for the console generation. They've gotten faster and faster because people are less tolerant of "teh boring". Just as WoW was massively faster than EQ and now vanilla would have been too slow moving.

We were showing the game to a in-law who pretty much only plays console games. Quite funny watching him mash the "1" key, wanting to know where his block button was and demanding "I want to kill something! Can I kill all these villagers" as soon as he spawned.

I'm still ambivalent about the class system. I think soft roles are good, but this might be a bit far. Maybe once people have explored the system a bit more and tactics evolve. Certainly I'm pretty sure the people who have worked this out aren't graveyard rushing.

[Zetor]

I don't agree that there's no strategy involved in [small-group] pve. I've taken down a champion [group event] boss with 3 people, and it was definitely challenging... everyone had to use all the control and support abilities to pull it off. Ditto with the CM dungeon run - I (elementalist) had to alternate between healing, damaging and CCing all the time, and I assume the others did too.

If anything, small-group play reminds me of COH teams without a tanker/brute in them... relying on the team to control and debuff the enemies and buff (not necessarily heal) the players.

[Maledict]

Yeah, I've watched videos of small teams *demolishing* this content - and then seen other groups have huge huge issues with it. Really comes down to individual skill and abilities combined with focussing as a team.

For example, no-one seems to gear for toughness or healing, and yet every player in a group is going to need to heal the self or take damage. Melee *have* to gear that way to survive the close range attacks, and yet folks seem to think you can load up on power and precision and be fine. It's not WoW, the mobs *will* be hittingy you and your going To need some Defense - both from gear and abilities.

[Genev]

Bah, tell that to my 2 bear pets! :p

I've only managed to go AC story mode so far, we haven't managed to get 5 people inside CM yet, most we've managed is 2, and the 1 run where I did explorable mode AC we had 4 thieves and a ranger (me), and while I've been told the content was cleared by 5 thieves.... that was simply not us.
I've decided to wait with dungeons now until they've fixed grouping and zoning.

My only problem with the ground circles is that if you see them, its too late to move out of them most of them time. You have to either be moving constantly when fighting mobs which throws ground stuff, and/or keep an eye out (the Rangers actually throw the traps in a relatively visible way), which is nearly impossible in group fight situations.

[Zetor]

Yeah, I definitely prefer the TSW approach for 'shit on the ground you gotta move out of'. WOW does pretty well on this front, too.

[Falconeer]

TSW does the aoe ground effects almost perfectly I'd say and I hope other companies will copy this in the future. It's particularly good cause it's easy to tune on their side. Just speed up or slow down the timer on those effects and there, you tweaked encounter difficulty in a second.

About GW2 dungeons, I think most of the complaints are about us refusing to learn to play a new game that doesn't work like all the others. The sooner you will forget "all the other ones" and start learning GW2, the sooner you'll stop dying in dungeons. This is so extremely true for sPvP too.

Mind, I didn't say that you will start liking the game more, and the end of the day this new-ish kind of gameplay might not be for everybody regardleas of positive first impressions.

[KallDrexx]

From what I've read, as I've yet to go into AC yet unfortunately, is that AC is easy once you get used to the GW2 mechanics.  The trick is you really need to get in sync with your teammates over your gear and abilities and heavily rely on conditions (especially chill) and combo fields to be able to get rid of mobs easier.  Also, a lot of people don't take the time to revive a newly downed player and let them get defeated when it's more useful to revive a down player most of the time than to keep firing on the enemy.

Was there any other indication that a cave was there, like a road ending near it or a blurry cave on the world map? I have been finding lots of tunnels connecting areas and underground spots that I can make out on the map in hindsight but finding it the first time is total luck. The explorer in me loves it while the OCD in me hates it.

Nope, no roads.  It was a small area off to the side of the river, and you had to angle yourself around a bit before you could even see the entrance.

[Lantyssa]

If anything, small-group play reminds me of COH teams without a tanker/brute in them... relying on the team to control and debuff the enemies and buff (not necessarily heal) the players.

Even my casters go the Toughness / Vitality route.  Makes a huge difference.

[Amaron]

I feel like the biggest problem is the game isn't giving any useful visual feedback.  How do you know if Chill is even doing something for instance? 

[Venkman]

I agree that the prettyness of the effects really fights against large groups. Duo-ing is great, because it's obvious when fields and finishers fire. I suppose 5-mans would be similarly easy to follow along.

But large groups/raids are complete chaos unless you have a strong group willing to follow orders and be organized. Of course, that willingness pretty much transcends any graphics anyway

I also think though that gear needs are so different between soloing and grouping. TSW handled this aspect better too with the ability to insta-swap full gear sets (when it worked...). Weapon-swapping in GW2 only applies to weapons, and doesn't exist for some classes.

[Quinton]

I really like the way the world looks.  It's just generally nice looking and enjoyable to wander around in.  Something about GW2 really reaches out to the explorer in me.  Lots of little things to find and collect helps, but that's only part of the story.

[Sjofn]

I haaaaaaaaate how hard it is to see things you need to get out of in this game. TSW's way is the best method I've seen.

[waffel]

Finished two map completions. Was actually fun exploring and all that.

But what isn't fun is getting a green weapon and piece of armor unuseable by my class. Both times. 

[Ingmar]

Yeah, I've watched videos of small teams *demolishing* this content - and then seen other groups have huge huge issues with it. Really comes down to individual skill and abilities combined with focussing as a team.

For example, no-one seems to gear for toughness or healing, and yet every player in a group is going to need to heal the self or take damage. Melee *have* to gear that way to survive the close range attacks, and yet folks seem to think you can load up on power and precision and be fine. It's not WoW, the mobs *will* be hittingy you and your going To need some Defense - both from gear and abilities.

That kind of balancing philosophy is fine for max level content, but if they expect people to be gearing with that much of a plan in mind at level 30, they're nuts. Most people probably haven't even seen a coherent statistically-matching set of gear of any kind by that point, let alone a specific toughness/healing one.

I should add, that I was fully specced into the 'toughness' line and the health/healing line on my traits (I'm a guardian), I have basically as many healing powers as it is possible for me to have, and I was still getting destroyed in melee, constantly.

[Sjofn]

Finished two map completions. Was actually fun exploring and all that.

But what isn't fun is getting a green weapon and piece of armor unuseable by my class. Both times. 

On the upside, those aren't bound to you, so you can save them for an alt or send them to a friend or whatever.

[Evildrider]

So we were doing Twilight Arbor last night , the level 50 dungeon, and we found a great tactic.  We all go ranged and run in a circle around the boss until he dies.  lol.  Melee was just getting their ass handed to them it was quite insane.  We just finally told them to equip bows and join us ranged people in our boss laps.

[Tannhauser]

Yeah, I've watched videos of small teams *demolishing* this content - and then seen other groups have huge huge issues with it. Really comes down to individual skill and abilities combined with focussing as a team.

For example, no-one seems to gear for toughness or healing, and yet every player in a group is going to need to heal the self or take damage. Melee *have* to gear that way to survive the close range attacks, and yet folks seem to think you can load up on power and precision and be fine. It's not WoW, the mobs *will* be hittingy you and your going To need some Defense - both from gear and abilities.

That kind of balancing philosophy is fine for max level content, but if they expect people to be gearing with that much of a plan in mind at level 30, they're nuts. Most people probably haven't even seen a coherent statistically-matching set of gear of any kind by that point, let alone a specific toughness/healing one.

I should add, that I was fully specced into the 'toughness' line and the health/healing line on my traits (I'm a guardian), I have basically as many healing powers as it is possible for me to have, and I was still getting destroyed in melee, constantly.

Yeah, that's been my experience as well.  I don't think the heavy armor mitigates enough.  Might be interesting to see heavy and light armor at the same level compare in value as well as mitigation.  My theory is that there isn't much change.

[Amaron]

I'm losing my patience with random passerby's picking up my Elite Fiery Greatsword after I've summoned it.  It's cool that I can share it and all but it's pretty freaking annoying most of the time.

[Spiff]

There's basically no tradeoff for the incredibly punishing nature of melee, most bosses need maybe 1-3 hits to take anyone down so you're constantly dodging/defending which destroys the slight dps advantage melee has completely. Same is true in WvW, although melee has somewhat viable roles there.

Which is such a shame, because I love the melee; it's fast, intense and the moves are twice as cool as any ranged one. It's just little more than a novelty at this point unless you want to actively gimp yourself.

Fixing the signalling would go a long way already.
Especially if there's a mesmer, ele or guardian present: my screen lights up like a nuclear powered Christmas tree, I feel like I should be wearing shades and some sunblock half the time.

This was mentioned time and again in beta as well, little was done (it's not a small change of course).

[fake Edit] I always felt that in a game where everyone has viable melee and ranged options, melee needs to have some pretty major upside(s).
Either like twice as much dps potential than ranged or a bunch more CC/conditions.
As is the only major upside I see is they get a lot more reliable/better combo options, maybe once everyone figures out the combo-system that'll make a bigger difference.

[Outlawedprod]

https://twitter.com/SpaceDrakeCF/status/242046608261382144

Although it sounds like Guild Wars 2 is a disaster waiting to happen. $150 million to make it? 6 million sales to break even?

Right before this he tweeted

Holy shit the Runic guys at this panel GET PC distribution. Meanwhile this lawyer moderating is out of his depth. #PAX

This is the twitter of one of the guys who translated and released Recettear on Steam.  Apparently he tweeted this from PAX.   Has anyone heard of that 150 million GW2 figure before?!

[Zetor]

Since this seems to be the designated h8 thread, here are my gripes after having played the game way more than is probably healthy in the last week or so

- I'm one of the few people in this thread who enjoyed the (asura / priory, in case that matters) personal story quite a bit. However, after level 50ish, the storyline merged into a cookie-cutter "whatever, it's epic" thing where the missions revolve around way too many annoying mobs with way too much hp. There are lots of new people introduced and ditched every mission, and now that the main thrust of the story is revealed, it is just as uninspiring as GW1:Prophecies was (which, for me, was catatonic sleep interspersed with some eyerolling). C'mon Arenanet people, you can do a Factions or even Nightfall-level storyline (and the asura/priory story quests were good, dammit), what's up with this? Hope it gets better, but I'm at the high 60s now and... yeah.
- The lack of a working trading post and stuff is getting on my nerves, and I'm not a big AH guy to begin with. Some of my guildies are reporting problems with the confirmation emails and stuff (see security thread), being able to see the guild bank, doing anything with the guild when in overflow... that's some clownshoes right there.
- Dungeon balance. I don't think the trinity-less system itself is bad (it's COH without tanks), but tuning lowbie dungeons the way they did is pretty insane. There are already hardmode (explorable) versions, let those be hard, and don't make the trash harder than the bosses in any case - people didn't run most heroics in WOW-BC for a reason. What baffles me is that AC is/was the most-tested dungeon (and the only one available in BWEs), is that why it's so overtuned?
- Most dynamic events with too many people just throw truckloads of mobs at the group, and devolve into boring AOE spamfests; however, DEs with a small number of people (like 2-5) work great and are a lot more fun. I have no idea how to fix this, or even if it's possible to fix this. I guess this might just sort itself out over time as population spreads out / stabilizes.
- Underwater combat doesn't feel too fun to me (even though I get probably the most buttons/options as an elementalist)... not much variance in combat either. Perhaps it's better for other classes?

I still like the game quite a bit, but some clownshoes are definitely showing...

[kildorn]

So we were doing Twilight Arbor last night , the level 50 dungeon, and we found a great tactic.  We all go ranged and run in a circle around the boss until he dies.  lol.  Melee was just getting their ass handed to them it was quite insane.  We just finally told them to equip bows and join us ranged people in our boss laps.

Was this the necro boss? The rest I saw people melee fight, but the necro is a kiting fight, so running away while dealing damage is really important. It's also the one total bullshit fight of that otherwise actually fun instance.

[Kageru]

Some bosses are intended to be ranged. You can tell because there's a fresh carpet of dead melee characters at it's feet. The "Ice Shaman" boss in the first Norn zone is like that. He's pretty much rooted, ranged AoE attack, powerful PBAoE and intended to be a ranged but you only tend to discover that after the fact. I suspect you need to look for a boss that isn't really moving and be very wary of whether you are meant to melee it.

The spell effects, when in a mass, are overpowering. Need an EQ like "particle effects slider" that turns them down but I doubt it has one. All the graphic artists would cry if you turn their lovingly crafted bling down. Likewise the circles are easy to miss and the mob, "going to do my big attack now!" animations hard to see when it's somewhere in the middle of the mass.

In terms of dungeons it's worth considering those are effectively the end-game PvE content and should be pretty hard. I assume that's why they are rigged up to give armor appearance as an indicator of achievement rather than massive power boosts in gear which would make them a necessity. I've not done one yet though so look forward to seeing it first hand and learning the hate.

- Most dynamic events with too many people just throw truckloads of mobs at the group, and devolve into boring AOE spamfests; however, DEs with a small number of people (like 2-5) work great and are a lot more fun. I have no idea how to fix this, or even if it's possible to fix this. I guess this might just sort itself out over time as population spreads out / stabilizes.
- Underwater combat doesn't feel too fun to me (even though I get probably the most buttons/options as an elementalist)... not much variance in combat either. Perhaps it's better for other classes?

I think these are just the way it is. With open world events you can't have a lockout. And underwater combat is more an alternative environment which means it will never have the same degree of depth as the main-line.

150 million development budget is pretty impressive. There certainly is an awful lot of hand-crafted content so I could actually believe it, but I'm impressed they had that much money to spend.

[Modern Angel]

I distinctly remember a report years ago from NCSoft about how important GW2 was to the company's overall health. It wouldn't surprise me at all if money had been funneled to GW2.

[KallDrexx]

Game seems to be getting mroe and more buggy as time goes on.

Was excited to do my first AC run today.... until the game put 4 of my groupmates in one instance of AC and me in another and I couldn't actually get into their instance.  Soo.... no AC for me :(

[Numtini]

I'm enjoying the game well enough. The world is beautiful. I like the Asura storyline. If I get into a big event, it can be fun. However, I'm very skeptical I'll last long enough for max level. Whatever the idea is to success here, I don't think I'm understanding it. Or I understand it, but it's just not worth the trouble to toggle between four elements depending on healing or debuffing or whatever and firing the abilities seems less efficient than spamming DPS and running around like a chicken with my head cut off. The result is killing stuff is either trivial or impossible and I keep advancing without really feeling like I've learned much along the way other than to mash buttons.

For all people deride "the end game" and "the trinity" I'm missing both. I feel like I'm another superfluous DPS and my other skills are really meager. And despite the fact that with a toddler and trying to write, I have a better chance of penning a best seller than having time for raiding, I still miss the illusion that there's something there at the end.

[Modern Angel]

Damned if you do, damned if you don't. And what is up with her sharp knees?