First Impressions

[Arinon]

This reminds me of some game, where you had chance to recover if you did something, but damned if I can't remember which one (mighta been an RPG or an MMO). Here it seems a bit more advanced because I have four different tools to do so.

Borderlands?  That's what instantly came into my head the first time I popped back up.  Surprised this kind of mechanic isn't all over gaming.  Maybe it is but I just missed it.

Did a some partial roster sPvP last night.  Learned that I suck hard right now and also that the spell effects are way too busy, even in small fights.  I find it hard to tell what's going on.

[Amaron]

Holy jesus that took me an hour and annoyed the hell out of me.  the first jumping stage (the wind area) is the hardest though.  The 2nd stage has a pretty easy shortcut from the start once you get attuned.

Haha actually the one I'm talking about is HARDER than the one you're talking about.  It's possibly shorter but definitely harder.   I thought it was the one that gave attunements.  Actually you don't have to do the one I was talking about at all thankfully.

[El Gallo]

See, I find the PvE perfectly entertaining. It's not world changing, but I do like that I can kinda wander aimlessly and find things to do.

This is exactly how I feel too.  Dunno how long I'll keep playing, but am having fun wandering around the newbie zone so far.
Biggest annoyance: my pets always pull aggro and die in seconds (necro).  I assume there's some way around that I'll eventually figure out.

Also, am I missing something or is there nothing in the UI that tells you when you target is out of range for an ability?

[Crumbs]

It's the exploration that makes me love the PvE.

There is a small river running through the area Tmon mentioned.  Just for kicks I jump in the river to see if it's deep.  No quest, no loot, just exploring.  That's when I notice an underwater cave!  But it's guarded by lvl 6 fish, and I'm lvl 2.  A few others from the dynamic event we just finished noticed I jumped in and followed me.  Together we killed the fish and made our way through the underwater cave.  We got out in an area with lvl 8 npcs.  When I opened the overworld map, I saw we had just cut under what looks to be impassible mountains to a higher level area that is accessible on land by going a long ways around.  This was an incredibly neat shortcut from the beginner zone which I found just by messing around.

That made me feel like the first time I ran to Neriak from Ogguk. Throw in getting xp for everything, auto-groups, skill points, vistas, etc., and I love the PvE.

Agreed.  In most other games, if I started exploring or doing anything "off the beaten path," it felt like a waste of time because it didn't contribute to the progression of my character.  In this game, it feels like there is a great balance of rewards for all different styles of gameplay....which makes for a "complete" game.  Everything counts.

I'm having a blast.  Group cooperation is working.  It is chaotic to run around and jump in the events but to be honest that's what I like about it.  It's a busy world and you just shit your pants and jump in.  Getting the hang of abilities, combos, crafting and UI mapping.  It flows.  Clearly Arenanet has been paying attention to the industry and its evolution in a way that other hapless companies chose not to.   

[Maledict]

Holy jesus that took me an hour and annoyed the hell out of me.  the first jumping stage (the wind area) is the hardest though.  The 2nd stage has a pretty easy shortcut from the start once you get attuned.

Haha actually the one I'm talking about is HARDER than the one you're talking about.  It's possibly shorter but definitely harder.   I thought it was the one that gave attunements.  Actually you don't have to do the one I was talking about at all thankfully.

I'm perplexed - I've done all the vista's, skill points, POI and waypoints in the Asura starting zone and don't recognise anything from what you are talking about - neither a really long hard puzzle that has enemies hitting you whilst you jump, or a puzzle that requires attunement to t a crystal?

[Amaron]

Holy jesus that took me an hour and annoyed the hell out of me.  the first jumping stage (the wind area) is the hardest though.  The 2nd stage has a pretty easy shortcut from the start once you get attuned.

Haha actually the one I'm talking about is HARDER than the one you're talking about.  It's possibly shorter but definitely harder.   I thought it was the one that gave attunements.  Actually you don't have to do the one I was talking about at all thankfully.

I'm perplexed - I've done all the vista's, skill points, POI and waypoints in the Asura starting zone and don't recognise anything from what you are talking about - neither a really long hard puzzle that has enemies hitting you whilst you jump, or a puzzle that requires attunement to t a crystal?

The puzzle I was trying to do is in the freezing room at the reactor plant (building to the extreme NW).   You're jumping along and there are these freezing turrets that also push you back.   You have to time your jumps , kill them and watch out for the knockback.   There are also tough mobs at various levels.   The actual jumping part wasn't that hard though really.   I don't know how long it is as I didn't finish it.

The other one is this:

exploring spoiler warning on this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDmZOnPFwYE

It's a hidden jumping puzzle with waypoints that you need attunements for that's quite involved.   Each zone has several hidden things like this with a boss+chest at the end.

[Tyrnan]

Also, am I missing something or is there nothing in the UI that tells you when you target is out of range for an ability?

Underneath each of your skills there a horizontal bar. It turns red if your target is out of range of that skill.

[trias_e]

The story quest mission writing is pretty bad.  The characters are generic and bland, I find myself skipping through dialogue constantly (whereas in TSW I would listen to 2-3 minute dialogues before missions.)

The story quests themselves aren't bad.  They have a good role in the game as to serve as a sort of backbone to the scattered nature of the game's PvE.  I just wish they had interesting characters in them.

As others have said, exploration really does make the PvE work.  The hearts and whatever other side missions that pop up range from ok to meh.  There's just not much to them.   Escort something.  Perform a menial task a whole bunch.  Kill a whole bunch of repeatedly spawning things in one spot.  Pick up stuff and give to quest giver a whole bunch, and usually way too much.  I often find myself groaning in the middle of doing these.  I think that because it has to be accessible to people just hopping into the area at any point that there can't be too much complexity to them, sadly.  There was one quest that was somewhat interesting in the first 10 levels of Norn gameplay (solving riddle statues), even if the riddles were way too easy with only three options to pick from.  

But after you finish a heart and are bored of that sort of thing you can just go exploring.  Harvest, find vistas, find points of interest.  That really breaks up the monotony of the somewhat mediocre quests, and rewards me for what I would be doing in the first place.  It's awesome, and I wish every diku would have more of this.  I wish even GW2 would have more of this!  

WvW and PvP will be fun and will be the main value of the game for me, but I will probably go through the PvE content simply due to the exploration.  And it could get at less mindless at higher levels, although I doubt the grindiness will go away.

[PalmTrees]

It's been average so far for my sylari mesmer. The public event/zerg style questing leaves a bit to be desired. There's all these conditions, boons, combos but ... zerg. I get a few auto attacks in on something before it dies. Up to level 12 and I've seen two combo messages in my chat log. I never feel like I'm doing much during these zerg rushes.

Tradeskills are ok. Discovery is rather straightforward. Even with breaking down all my loots, I'm always hurting for tailoring mats though. Jewelry had a bit of hump in it, I got mostly 25 skill gems and hardly and of the <25 kind. Feels like it took longer than it should have to get it to 25 with all those 25 skill gems sitting there, mocking me the whole time.

[Riggswolfe]

I made a thief instead of my beta choice of a warrior. The gameplay is much, much more fun as a thief. However, I do have a big gripe about the PVE. There is pretty much no reason to make a party in this game. Even if you meet up you're just going to do the heart stuff that you'd be doing anyway and most likely you'll go hours without seeing each other as one of you is usually on another overflow server. Quite annoying. We never saw a "change instance" button or whatever either.

[Amaron]

The story quest mission writing is pretty bad.  

The quality is extremely inconsistent.  The human story was complete crap for the limited part I did.  I quite like the Asura one so far though.  There are some multistage events that are pretty neat too.

[KallDrexx]

Holy jesus that took me an hour and annoyed the hell out of me.  the first jumping stage (the wind area) is the hardest though.  The 2nd stage has a pretty easy shortcut from the start once you get attuned.

Haha actually the one I'm talking about is HARDER than the one you're talking about.  It's possibly shorter but definitely harder.   I thought it was the one that gave attunements.  Actually you don't have to do the one I was talking about at all thankfully.

I'm perplexed - I've done all the vista's, skill points, POI and waypoints in the Asura starting zone and don't recognise anything from what you are talking about - neither a really long hard puzzle that has enemies hitting you whilst you jump, or a puzzle that requires attunement to t a crystal?

There are no POIs or anything for it.  It's a bonus puzzle that gives you a chest with decent loot at the end.  It's near the Cuatl Morass waypoint

[Tmon]

I made a thief instead of my beta choice of a warrior. The gameplay is much, much more fun as a thief. However, I do have a big gripe about the PVE. There is pretty much no reason to make a party in this game. Even if you meet up you're just going to do the heart stuff that you'd be doing anyway and most likely you'll go hours without seeing each other as one of you is usually on another overflow server. Quite annoying. We never saw a "change instance" button or whatever either.

The biggest reason to make a party is that it gives you a bonus to earning influence points for your guild, the secondary reason below 30 is because you get your own chat channel .  When you hit 30 you will need to group in order to get into the same dungeon instance. 

[Venkman]

This reminds me of some game, where you had chance to recover if you did something, but damned if I can't remember which one (mighta been an RPG or an MMO). Here it seems a bit more advanced because I have four different tools to do so.

Borderlands?  That's what instantly came into my head the first time I popped back up.  Surprised this kind of mechanic isn't all over gaming.  Maybe it is but I just missed it.

Hmm that might be it. Get Downed but you still had a chance to finish the mob off and if you did, all was right in the world right? Was there also some type of slowmo effect too, or am i thinking a different game (maybe ME3)?

[Sjofn]

The story quest mission writing is pretty bad.  

The quality is extremely inconsistent.  The human story was complete crap for the limited part I did.  I quite like the Asura one so far though.  There are some multistage events that are pretty neat too.

I agree here, my human mesmer's story is pretty by the numbers and bland, but my Norn story is vaguely interesting.


EDIT: Not saying any of it has me going OMG WHAT HAPPENS NEXT, but I had pretty low expectations here anyway, so it doesn't bother me. :P

[MediumHigh]

The story quest mission writing is pretty bad.  

The quality is extremely inconsistent.  The human story was complete crap for the limited part I did.  I quite like the Asura one so far though.  There are some multistage events that are pretty neat too.

I agree here, my human mesmer's story is pretty by the numbers and bland, but my Norn story is vaguely interesting.

What level are you? Guild wars stories don't hit the crazy until half way through in level.


EDIT: Not saying any of it has me going OMG WHAT HAPPENS NEXT, but I had pretty low expectations here anyway, so it doesn't bother me. :P

Lolz, troll by php.

Orginal post, I simple wanted to ask what level were you? Generally Guild Wars stories don't get batshit crazy until halfway into the game.

[Zetor]

I really like the asura story. The norn story was ok (I got to level 20ish in beta) if a bit all over the place, and the charr story was interesting too as far as I got in it (level ~16ish in Ash Legion, if that counts). Haven't played sylvari or human, so no experience there.

e: what surprised me is that there's a fair bit of branching. Of course it's probably not a huge deal gameplay-wise, but still nice.

[Sjofn]

Yeah I hit a branching part with the Norn story. Ingmar's went in one direction and mine went in another (WAY BETTER) direction. She's only level 11 or so but it's still grabbed me more than my human's (who is also low level). And this is a first impressions thread! :P

[Ashamanchill]

The Charr story is really fucking fun, IMO. I love how some of the choices you made at champ creating have an effect.

[Nightblade]

Yeah for the PVE you just kind of need to dick around, buy your gathering matts and just walk around, chop any tree you see, kill if you feel like it, or if something attacks you, get caught up in a local event, etc.

[luckton]

So, from what I'm reading, it sounds like they've implemented "meaningful" PvE, or at least got dynamic and public questing from Warhammer and Rift "right", if not "close enough", right?

[Kageru]

It's a substantial improvement over Warhammer and Rift because the events are the levelling path rather than a sideshow, scale in level and players down scale. So it solves the problem of the event handling too many people, too few people and high levels farming it. It doesn't stop people seeing the repetition in the gameplay, and it is less directed, but it confirms the approach is valid.

[Sky]

It seems like every time I get to the front of the queue to get off the overflow, I'm right in the middle of an event I don't want to leave. I played all evening in the overflow.

Great game for just screwing around for a few hours of mildly directed gameplay. Story sucks and VO is terribad.

As far as grouping go, I'm a guardian so I do try to stand close to people.

[Ingmar]

The technology is all really impressive I think, from the launcher to the instancing etc.

I had kind of a fffffffffffuuuuuuuuu moment in the story quest yesterday, where it was just an absolute monster jump in difficulty compared to everything I had done up to that point, and I've been making a point to do all the events/heart stuff in an area before I do the story, just because I've heard of that happening. I ended up having to death rush it like 15 times before I was able to finally get the last mob killed, I was in my underwear at that point since everything was broken. And that's after an extra couple hours of leveling in WvW, too. Some tuning might still be needed in a couple spots.

[kildorn]

Yeah, I hit a sylvari +1 story that required a lot of bullshitting of the AI to beat last night. Was me + terrible NPCs vs around 30 of the meaner mid level mob type.

[Ingmar]

Yeah this was similar. Me, 3 NPCs, vs like 3 or 4 waves of level 12 guys. I was level 12, all the stuff in the area outside where this story quest took place was like 10-11.

[trias_e]

The technology is all really impressive I think, from the launcher to the instancing etc.

I had kind of a fffffffffffuuuuuuuuu moment in the story quest yesterday, where it was just an absolute monster jump in difficulty compared to everything I had done up to that point, and I've been making a point to do all the events/heart stuff in an area before I do the story, just because I've heard of that happening. I ended up having to death rush it like 15 times before I was able to finally get the last mob killed, I was in my underwear at that point since everything was broken. And that's after an extra couple hours of leveling in WvW, too. Some tuning might still be needed in a couple spots.

The worst is that since you scale down for those events just leveling up a few times doesn't really help all that much.  I had a rough time with one of the Norn story missions (rumors of trouble I think it was), figured I could just level up a few times and it would be easy.  Nope, still a total pain.

[Ingmar]

That was the one.

[Zetor]

Up to level 26ish, the asura story has been mostly fine balance-wise. It probably helps that I play an overpowered elementalist and Zojja (who's at least a "veteran" mob judging from her portrait icon) along with her pet golem assist me in almost every fight  

The one egregiously overtuned thing I found was The boss does a few things that are especially devastating to zergs:
- summons aoe circles all around its room, both randomly and directly under people; number of circles seems to correlate with the number of people present. The circles trigger pretty much instantly, knocking you down (!) and doing an aoe dot for about 70% of a glass cannon's hp every two seconds. Since you're knocked down, you're guaranteed to eat two ticks (-> downed) and then a third tick before you can get away with downstate3 (-> dead)
- summons adds regularly (# of adds depends on people participating, so we had at least 7-8 flying around at any time). The adds are ranged and ALSO put aoe circles on the ground (lava font) that hit hard if you stay in them, but at least those don't knock you down.
- some other kinds of fire trails etc. that are visible, but don't have an aoe indicator... if you step in one of them, you're very likely screwed.
- the boss' room is only accessible through a narrow bridge, which is guaranteed to be saturated with AOEs (due to players standing around either alive or downed). The room itself is fairly large, but the adds spawn all over, and there are no safe spots from the aoe circles inside the room that I could see.

Now of course there are ways to deal with the boss - if you have stability or a stunbreaker, you can survive getting caught in an AOE circle, otherwise you can keep running and circle strafing the (immobile) boss. You can also get past the chokepoint by using invulnerabilities or teleports (dodging, any of the charge/rush abilities, abilities that make you "evade" stuff like burning retreat, etc). I could knock off around 10% of its health solo by running around and using all my instants / DOTs on it before I inevitably ate it due to adds spawning on me, or me dodging into another circle... then it was corpserun time. Still, it was freaking brutal for everyone involved, often I just died randomly when trying to enter the room due to a surprise AOE circle spawning under me.


Regarding dynamic events, the 'sweet spot' seems to be around 5-7 people. More than that and everything turns into a zerg/aoe-fest. There aren't really any zerg-busting DEs that I've seen, except one or two events that had those undead plague carriers that explode on people for half their hp (saw one of those explosions down about 5-6 people at once)

[Amaron]

That boss is freaking retarded.  Even with great reflexes you won't get out of most of those circles.  Everyone just ends up zerging it from the res point.

[Ingmar]

Tip: if you want bonus kill XP, kill dolyaks. Nobody ever seems to kill them since they aren't aggressive.

[Sjofn]

So like. I hate jumping puzzles. I am terrible at them and they make me cry.

Yet I cannot stop fucking doing them to get the stupid vista points. What is happening to meeeeeeeee?

[Der Helm]

So like. I hate jumping puzzles. I am terrible at them and they make me cry.

Yet I cannot stop fucking doing them to get the stupid vista points. What is happening to meeeeeeeee?

Wait till you stumble over the non-obvious ones in the PvP zones. One took me and 2 other guys about an hour to figure out. But I got some nice PvP siege engine blueprints out of it.

[Sjofn]

Oh God, they're even in PvP? 

[Amaron]

So like. I hate jumping puzzles. I am terrible at them and they make me cry.

One trick I've found is several classes can get +10% speed.  For a lot of jumps this provides a sort of margin of error that makes them much easier.  Quickness is good for some jumps where you don't have to worry about about overjumping.