First Impressions

[Genev]

I'm a bit annoyed at the moment that for some reason, siege engines don't work right for me. in the world when i meet a heart which uses mortars or ballistas without a target circle, when i fire them it just kinda falls flat right in front of the engine. With hearts and events you can work your way around that by doing something else, but in the story mission i'm stuck now because of that, can't continue.... Nobody else seems to ahve this problem either >_<

[01101010]

I'm a bit annoyed at the moment that for some reason, siege engines don't work right for me. in the world when i meet a heart which uses mortars or ballistas without a target circle, when i fire them it just kinda falls flat right in front of the engine. With hearts and events you can work your way around that by doing something else, but in the story mission i'm stuck now because of that, can't continue.... Nobody else seems to ahve this problem either >_<

Holding the fire button down then releasing?

[March]

Scaling is brilliant because it keeps content alive. And viable content (plus no farming of lower level zones and events, and being able to group) is always the weak point of MMO's. That said the scaling isn't perfect. A higher level character with more skills unlocked, traits and gear still seems substantially tougher than a zone native.

The lack of reward in dungeons has been known for a while. They've been set up effectively as optional challenges with cosmetic rewards. So they can be tuned to be very challenging because you don't need anything from their and get only acknowledgement you've beaten it. It's pretty ballsy, MMO players tend to optimise around things that don't enhance their character, but on the other hand beating a challenge and being able to visibly flaunt that fact motivates the achievers too without nuking the power balance.

Yeah, I mean, like I say, there are certainly benefits and it's an interesting choice. I just end up left feeling a little lost as to why I'm chasing levels and gear sometimes after all of the scaling stuff they've done. It might be "brilliant" - but in the end, is it smart?

Put me in the Brilliant *and* smart camp.  Last night I went to the foliage starter zone with my L25 Norn just to hunt pets... and Loved it.  I have never, ever, ever, gone back to a starter zone in any other game to farm mats or anything else.  If it was grey to me, it was dead to me.  Now, admittedly, I was on the top end of the power-curve for my down-ranked L3 ranger... but not 1-shot power... just enough to feel like I had the zone completely under control, but still needed to work through the area to achieve what I wanted.  That may not work for some, but I found it outstanding.  The fact that the XP was still useful, and got level appropriate drops?  Pushes beyond Brilliant to near genius.

[Genev]

I'm a bit annoyed at the moment that for some reason, siege engines don't work right for me. in the world when i meet a heart which uses mortars or ballistas without a target circle, when i fire them it just kinda falls flat right in front of the engine. With hearts and events you can work your way around that by doing something else, but in the story mission i'm stuck now because of that, can't continue.... Nobody else seems to ahve this problem either >_<

Holding the fire button down then releasing?

Tried that, but guess i'll try again....

Edit: At least i'm pretty sure i tried that, it would be horribly embarassing if i ended up not having done so -_-
Edit 2: Yup, i'm an idiot

[01101010]

I'm a bit annoyed at the moment that for some reason, siege engines don't work right for me. in the world when i meet a heart which uses mortars or ballistas without a target circle, when i fire them it just kinda falls flat right in front of the engine. With hearts and events you can work your way around that by doing something else, but in the story mission i'm stuck now because of that, can't continue.... Nobody else seems to ahve this problem either >_<

Holding the fire button down then releasing?

Tried that, but guess i'll try again....

Edit: At least i'm pretty sure i tried that, it would be horribly embarassing if i ended up not having done so -_-

Well I am in the embarrassed camp having screwed around on the target practice heart in Snowden with the bolt throwers. I kept clicking and never paid attention to the charging bar below till after a whole lot of failed shots.

[Lantyssa]

And yeah, there's an underwater tunnel in the starter norn area, by the bear shrine. Surfaces in a cave and there's a skill point in there!

Two.  There's a longer river flowing through the mountain with a Drudge area and a couple of events.

[PalmTrees]

Npcs need to shut the hell up. At least the ones around crafting stations do. You're there for a bit and my god if I hear "excelsior, act with wisdom, interesting, all things have a right to grow" one more time...

Having to check which sickle to use on which plant is annoying.

I'm playing, because it's the new shiny and there's levels to be gained but I dunno about long term. Dps zerg is all there is for group content, well not group content as I haven't been in or seen anyone even try to form a group. It's even more of a single player mmo for me than swtor was, with less npc interaction.

[Sky]

Npcs need to shut the hell up. At least the ones around crafting stations do. You're there for a bit and my god if I hear "excelsior, act with wisdom, interesting, all things have a right to grow" one more time...

Might have to scale that back to only hearing when they greet you, rather than greeting everyone. It's been driving the fiancee nuts and I'm not very fond of it.

[Ingmar]

Having to check which sickle to use on which plant is annoying.

I just use the most expensive one I can afford, life is too short to swap around to different gathering tools. Supposedly you get special ingredients more often using better ones to harvest low level stuff anyway.

[Miasma]

I don't think there are special blue items from sickle nodes though.

[Nebu]

I don't think there are special blue items from sickle nodes though.

I occasionally get potions dyes this way though... not sure if sickle quality will affect how often this occurs though.

[Nevermore]

I don't think there are special blue items from sickle nodes though.

I got dye from one once.

[Sjofn]

Put me in the Brilliant *and* smart camp.  Last night I went to the foliage starter zone with my L25 Norn just to hunt pets... and Loved it.  I have never, ever, ever, gone back to a starter zone in any other game to farm mats or anything else.  If it was grey to me, it was dead to me.  Now, admittedly, I was on the top end of the power-curve for my down-ranked L3 ranger... but not 1-shot power... just enough to feel like I had the zone completely under control, but still needed to work through the area to achieve what I wanted.  That may not work for some, but I found it outstanding.  The fact that the XP was still useful, and got level appropriate drops?  Pushes beyond Brilliant to near genius.

I am exactly the same as you. If stuff turns grey, I pretty much never touch it again. I'd as soon make an alt to farm low level mats. I don't even like running friends through instances or whatever (I'll still do it, though) if the stuff is grey to me. I have never spent so much time wandering aimlessly through newbie zones as I have in this game.

[Ingmar]

Now that the trading post is up and working for everyone...

...the filters are terrible. Like worse than SWTOR at release bad. I can't filter by armor type, only by slot. I can't filter by a certain rarity and UP, only by an exact rarity. Can't preview from the AH, for some reason. Und so weiter.

EDIT: In other bad news, not only dying resets your 'XP survivor' track for the monthly. Apparently logging out or changing zones also halts progress. So to do the monthly currently you need to find a zone where you can rack up 100k XP in a single play session. And best hope they don't push a new bulid when you're at 75k like just happened to me tonight.

[Kageru]

I assume the second of those is not working as intended, so going to ignore it till it's fixed or they confirm it's meant to be silly.

[Ingmar]

Yeah I can't imagine that's how they mean for it to work, it doesn't say anything except 'don't die' in the achievement tooltip essentially.

[Tmon]

My gripe is that the search tool for the market seems to default to an or search when you enter a string.  So a search for copper ore brings up copper ore, gold ore, copper ingots, copper rings, etc.

[Zetor]

The trading post is pretty good for crafting in general (right click item in inventory or bank collection, "buy more on trading post", done), and when you type something into the search field it gives you a dropdown list wowhead-style with the 'exact match' being the first in the list. What IS pretty annoying is having to run over to a trading post to pick up the goods, then run all the way back to the crafting stations. I know there is trading post access things being sold in the gem store... and honestly, fuck that noise.

Also, the mention of SWTOR's GTN makes me want to stab things. Just sayin'. 

[ajax34i]

Sounds like the Elementalist has a unique issue:  you're expected to shift forms on the fly so you can use the appropriate abilities at the appropriate times, but until you've memorized what all the abilities are for all the forms (and all the weapons), your performance will suck.  Compare to WoW druids, who do have forms but stay in a form for an extended period, and have enough ability bars available to be able to see pop-up texts of their abilities whenever needed.

[Zetor]

Actually this was the reason I chose an elementalist in the first place (more buttons!) and didn't really have a problem -- just got to level 80 actually, mostly by solo pve / events (events in higher-level zones are much less zergy, for obvious reasons). You can build up 'rotations' that use abilities in 2-3 of your attunements in such a combination that by the time you switch back to your first attunement, the cooldowns will be up again... I use two such 'rotations' for typical solo situations (1 mob, 2-3 mobs) and wing it depending on the enemy for skill challenge / veteran mobs. In group fights I just make sure that I place as many combo fields as possible without them overlapping.

If anything, the problem with elementalists that their damage is kinda... low-ish unless you use daggers - at which point you pretty much become a super-squishy melee class. It's OK for me though, as I like playing support/control more than pure dps (support/control makes a HUGE difference in pvp and dungeon / other small-group pve)

[sachiel]

Actually this was the reason I chose an elementalist in the first place (more buttons!) and didn't really have a problem -- just got to level 80 actually, mostly by solo pve / events (events in higher-level zones are much less zergy, for obvious reasons). You can build up 'rotations' that use abilities in 2-3 of your attunements in such a combination that by the time you switch back to your first attunement, the cooldowns will be up again... I use two such 'rotations' for typical solo situations (1 mob, 2-3 mobs) and wing it depending on the enemy for skill challenge / veteran mobs. In group fights I just make sure that I place as many combo fields as possible without them overlapping.

If anything, the problem with elementalists that their damage is kinda... low-ish unless you use daggers - at which point you pretty much become a super-squishy melee class. It's OK for me though, as I like playing support/control more than pure dps (support/control makes a HUGE difference in pvp and dungeon / other small-group pve)

At lvl 65, I'm kind of surprised at how low my damage is vs single target and it takes me a while to solo something, and that's with quite a bit of +power stats on my gear and all equipment is up to level. When it comes to throwing down with friend or group is when we really shine with all the combo field, support and healing abilities.   It's an odd class and not really what you expect.  I was thinking more DD/nuker, but it's quite a bit different than that.  I like it quite a lot, but am constantly looking for a buddy to tag along with and support. 

Besides engineer, using an ele is like having 4 weapon swaps, basically.  I picked up staff at lvl 3 and haven't even unlocked skills for anything else but the scepter main hand that you start off with at level 1.  Still getting used to the "rotations" with staff and what works best depending on the situation.

[PalmTrees]

Story quest is really pissing me off. So damn unbalanced. Sylvari-Priory-skritt-"Defeat Destroyer Queen" is inducing much rage atm. Trying to survive a huge wave of destroyer crabs and harpies while I think I'm supposed to be protecting an npc so he can set off a bomb once I stun the Queen (champ mob) that spawns on a timer that keeps counting down even if I restart from checkpoint...

[KallDrexx]

I've been thinking about this a lot, but here is why I really don't like (and have no desire to) pvp in this game.

WvW
I have given up on playing WvW pretty much ever.  The queues are ridiculous on my server so it takes hours just to get in.  Since all there's no way for me to see queue length or anything I've just stopped trying. 

SPvP
This mode half makes me miss my time working on Fury, but also makes me realize that even without retarded management Fury would have failed.  The problem is that they took the FPSification of Guild Wars too far.  There are no incentives to actually trying to win the match, or even to pay attention to the score at all.  Everyone just runs around uncoordinated and no incentive to actually work together because, well why would you?  When the match is over the teams will be shuffled around.  Furthermore, the maps aren't noteworthy at all and have almost no variation to them, except for the pirate map which everyone agrees is fucking terrible because of the sharks (and since most people don't care about actually winning the match a lot of them just ignore the underwater point).  The maps are also pretty large and even with a full 8v8 you sometimes have to do a lot of running just to find a good fight.  There's zero incentive to keep in touch with your teammates (hell they'll just be enemies next round) and there's just zero stickiness.

Compare that to GW1.  In random arenas you would at least keep your team if you won giving you incentive to keep try and winning as long as you can for a good streak.  You definitely then notice your teammates when you start doing well and I've kept in touch with players I've played RA with. 

Then you have Heroes ascent, which is an 8 map tournament which you can queue into.  Each map had varied number of teams, varied objectives, and your goal was to progress with your team to the Hall of Heroes (final map) and try and overthrow the previous winner.  Your group's name (or guild name) were announced all over the server when you won, and hell if you took the winning spot from another region it would even announce your region as taking control of the HoH.  It was exciting and fun, and you worked hard not to get kicked out of the tournament.

There are no aspects of GW2 pvp that even come close to this, and nothing that makes me want to go back and do more SPvP.  The only rewards you get are cool looking gear, which you can't even take back with you into PvE.

Tournament Play

This is just terrible.  They just took the same maps as SPvP (that are built around 8v8) and make them be run 5v5.  This usually means you have 2 people holding cap points who do nothing but watch out for "hey they are coming to point X" and wait for your 2 roaming guys to come, and have 1 guy on the map's cannon / trebuchet.  There's no ladder system so nothing to work towards and it's just in general not that exciting.  I definitely feel that there's really not much depth to it.

[tazelbain]

I loved random arena, was very disappointed that something like it wasn't added to GW2.  The game would greatly benefit from a solo queue.  The FPS room thing is suppose to be so you can scrimmage with friends before you do tournaments. Maybe this shit works if you are organized team. But 99.999999% aren't and its full fail.

Anet is very strange when comes to PvP, They have dreams of being elite sport PvP. They keep chasing that carrot but falling short. If they create successful causal PvP, they run away from it.  I can only guess is that there are powerful people at A.net who are dead set on this idiotic course. And that's why there will never be a good casual sPvP in GW2.  To them, that is failure.

[Kageru]

Random Arena is where you can enter as a pre-built team and smash pug's? There's probably a reason why that isn't in there.

Tried WvW.. It's a lot of running and zerging with at least some structure to it. It will be entertaining but it's all so obviously an endless to and fro I can't really imagine taking it too seriously. Ranged, numbers, focus and mobility (especially if you wanted to hit objectives behind the lines) are going to be highly valued I'd think. Not too sure what my Guardian would do there.

I also realized why the needlessly huge cities exist. This was a project by people determined to make their world in every detail and with enough freedom to invest effort in stuff that was "cool". Which can either be taken as creative and committed or lax project management. If you talk to random NPC's you'll sometimes get dialog, when you pass some gravestones in a story quest they all have inscriptions, when you send or receive e-mail a bird does a fly-by to carry the mail. There's so many little details. I haven't seen this level of "building our dream" since early EQ (and maybe early WoW).

[01101010]

Down the road... I would love to see a city siege/invasion. They have the space for a ton of stuff to take place for something like this. 

[KallDrexx]

Random Arena is where you can enter as a pre-built team and smash pug's? There's probably a reason why that isn't in there.

Uh no.  Random arena is where you queued solo and got put in a random team of 4.  If your team won your team stuck together for as many games until you lost.  When you lose you go back to the "lobby" solo and queue up again by yourself.

[Nebu]

I know this will sound strange, but the more that I play this game the more it feels like Rift 2.  The zone events are a more stylized Rift system.  There are lots of places to explore and puzzles to solve.  The game is about zone completion that reminds me of the Rift/artifact hunts. 

Sadly, the pvp is worse.  The Dungeons are worse.  The character customization is worse.  The skill system is worse.

I really like what GW2 is trying to do, but it's going to need a few changes and an expansion to keep me with the game.  It's slowly losing my interest due to the poor pvp implementation.  No immunity timers?  Really? 

[tazelbain]

They do lots of holiday events in cities.  Multiple big cities give them plenty of room.

[Zetor]

I hated GW1 random arena. It was TOO random in that you'd end up in a team without a monk most of the time (yes, the obvious answer is 'play a monk'), and you only got a "functional" team very, very rarely. You were also completely shafted if you played some classes like ritualist who had barely any viable builds, and no 'good' builds. Plus, 'synching' was prevalent -- meaning that players would time their queues so they'd get in the same games / on the same team. Even if only two people did this, it was a huge advantage in a 4v4.

What I liked in GW1 pvp were the "scrub battlegrounds" from Factions (Fort Aspenwood and Jade Quarry), but even those were dominated by gimmick builds and builds designed to beat the gimmick builds; FA was a completely asymmetrical map too. And that was about it for "puggable" / casual pvp in GW1 (note that I wouldn't call RA casual, at least not late in the game's life). Compared to that, the 4 spvp maps and wvw are a godsend.

BTW, I think I've read somewhere that GW2 spvp maps are designed for 5 people in the first place -- 8 is for the 'zergy' pickup pvp.

[Venkman]

Actually this was the reason I chose an elementalist in the first place (more buttons!)
...

It's an odd class and not really what you expect.  I was thinking more DD/nuker, but it's quite a bit different than that.  I like it quite a lot, but am constantly looking for a buddy to tag along with and support. 

Yea I'm kinda in a similar boat. I'm still way young (32) but I'm not feeling like the WoW-style Fire Mage DD/Nuker I was expecting. At the same time, I also don't hate it. Not sure why. Maybe just still New Game Smell, but there's something about this class and it's sheer array of options which makes me ok with diversity trumping specialty. Playing an Engy for a bit feels similar. By spreading abilities so far and wide, by reducing the standout performance of a few abilities unique to each class, they really did reduce the need for the trinity.

I don't mind dagger/dagger or dagger/focus range though, because some of the abilities allow me to get in and get out of range quickly. I also smartened up and started blending in toughness/vitality gems and gear from tailoring too.

I'm not entirely sold that my investments in crafting are worth it. But then, I'm skill upping at a nice path just on discovery unlocks alone, and because I gather the shit out of a map, all the foodstuffs and wood I'm farming are funding all the cloths I'm buying. Because damn if you can't farm cloth/leather nearly as easy as trees and bushes.

[Sky]

Speaking of tons of options, I just rolled a warrior and zomg the loadouts. I like about six of them. Sword/mace is pretty nifty with a horn swap for movement, but then I also need my rifle or bow, I like bof o dem. And greatsword is also great.

[01101010]

Speaking of tons of options, I just rolled a warrior and zomg the loadouts. I like about six of them. Sword/mace is pretty nifty with a horn swap for movement, but then I also need my rifle or bow, I like bof o dem. And greatsword is also great.

Add in axes... dual wielding. Yeah... it is a tad overwhelming.

[Threash]

Dual axes is amazing for warriors.  Until the npcs get smart, something btw i freaking love.  Npc's that stop attacking when i use a block and retaliate move, that move out of the way when i use a stationary high damage move, that roll at the precise time when i use a high damage one hit move, that use knockdowns when i use a mobile high damage attack? fucking win.  And it's only the NPcs that make sense, like bandits, that play smart.

[Ingmar]

Dual axes is amazing for warriors.  Until the npcs get smart, something btw i freaking love.  Npc's that stop attacking when i use a block and retaliate move, that move out of the way when i use a stationary high damage move, that roll at the precise time when i use a high damage one hit move, that use knockdowns when i use a mobile high damage attack? fucking win.  And it's only the NPcs that make sense, like bandits, that play smart.

Either you're imagining this, or warriors get unfairly screwed on this. I've never noticed anything like this happening to my guardian at all. At most it's the usual sort of 'ranged monster tries to keep distance' and 'wussy monster runs at low health' kind of stuff.