User:Raine Valen/Musings/Current

So let's talk about GW2.

I played it over beta weekend; here are my impressions.

PvE isn't terrible.

If any of you actually know me, you probably know that I loathed PvE in Guild Wars. It was dumb. Not "it was too hard" or "it was too easy" or "it was imbalanced" or whatever. It was dumb. I've written about it all over the place, so I'll spare the reiteration.

GW2 PvE, on the other hand, was brilliant (caveat: mostly). Perhaps the most brilliant aspect was something that the designers said that they focused on: they wanted to make the game such that players didn't get in the way of players. And, y'know what, it worked. When running around, if I found another player and wanted to play with them, neither of us were a hindrance to one another.

Admittedly, that had its drawbacks: namely, it was tough to form parties for things. Because the game is so ad-hoc friendly, people have little interest in formal parties. I wouldn't mind seeing more incentive for that. For example, the skill point quest at the sunken Temple of the Ages involves (maybe) killing an ostensibly-difficult foe (more on that later) so that the player may interact with the skill point unmolested.

In a party, the difficult foe becomes much easier to tackle: one person kites it while the other person blows it up. Or one person tanks it while the water ele spams their no-recharge AoE heal (no dedicated healer right?). Alternatively, a coordinated party can ignore it altogether: when I did the quest on my warrior, I jumped into the swamp just in time to watch the thing swim away after someone else and then climb out of the water in pursuit. I helped them kill it (after I got the skill point for literally 0 effort), but that was just because I'm a nice person.

While I'm here, I should note: you can kill the thing at any level (hence "ostensibly" difficult), because it can't actually hit you if you swim sideways. In fact, most melee foes can't actually hit you at all if you move sideways. That's, uh, kind of a design flaw. I'm sure that'll get fixed, maybe.

Anyway, point is: game is soloable 99% of the time (from what I've seen), so parties make things extra-hella easy 99% of the time. The other 1% of the time, if you don't find a random stranger nearby, you're shafted because formal parties mostly didn't exist, from what I experienced.

PvP, however, is terrible.

It's a clusterfuck. Imagine AB, but with 5 individual players instead of 3 parties, and 0 coordination. Yeah it's pretty much that. For Conquest, at least. It was a successful game mode in Halo, and became a staple of the FPS industry. Leave it there, please.

Bring back oldschool RA, GvG, and HA, in my humble opinion. Keep the hot-join casual stuff, sure; there's a place for that. But there was a place for high-end, too.

Eles are fun to play.

So much versatility! If you're PvEing on an ele, you get the benefit of being awesome at everything. You want to solo any boss you can find? Go Earth and bleed it to death because there's no counter to that shit. You wanna completely counter any source of melee damage? Target that shit and spam your staff autoattack, because it's an AoE heal whenever it hits. Maybe you're tired of playing ele and wishing you'd rolled a warrior or something? Fucking double dagger it and Lightning Whip things to death (because this bar plays so much like a warrior that it's dumb). Eles can literally fucking do everything.

It's probably not awesome for "balance", but it's fun! For eles, anyway.

Also, Chain Lightning is broken as fuck. Kills ALL the things.

Melee feels weightless.

Not in the good way, either. GW1 Primal Rage made you feel "weightless" in the sense of "I'm a motherfucking cannonball with a jetpack". In GW2, it's more like "I'm sort of a butterfly".

The lack of collision detection (body blocking) plays a big part in that. If your KD or snare is on recharge, you get to watch people mostly walk away from you. Yeah, it's cute that you get to use Rush with your greatsword three times per minute. Small swords get Savage Leap, which is a significantly better. Axes have Eviscerate. So you can hit people who aren't standing in your face getting wailed on. But... then what?

Remember back when warriors had a skill with a 10-second recharge that put kiters in their place? Yeah, there's none of that. No quarterknocking. No dchop.

Where, before, warriors were characterized by being able to say "NOT TODAY, NOT ON MY WATCH!", now they're just... meek. Playing a warrior feels a lot like playing a caster with a severely-limited range.

Auction House!

Rocks my socks. It has live investment statistics, for fuck's sake. I'd tap that.