4281

If it’s running you want, SWTOR is totally the best option :D

4282

What exactly is meaningful about GW2’s WvW that resets every couple of weeks? It’s like just about every other game, MMO or not, in that it’s ultimately pointless. The only real point is to be entertained.

WoW’s open world PvP was entertaining to me before the BGs opened, and the Tarren Mill stuff was entertaining (and in some ways like two groups in GW2 fighting in WvW) until it disappeared. If you didn’t like it, well, different strokes and all that.

And I don’t think Blizzard “fucked it” when they tried to add open world PvP. I think that open world PvP just isn’t something that most players want, even if they profess otherwise. The mechanics were there in the expansions for selected areas, but the players decided they’d rather do PvE and get to the level cap.

I’m still hoping that WvW eventually pops for me and becomes the reason I want to fire up GW2. So far it’s hit or miss, either some great battles or zoning in and spending a lot of time running around and wishing there were meaningful battles. I think one of the most surprising things about GW2 for me, not having done my due diligence before buying, is how PvE-centric it really is. I thought the rep for Guild Wars was it was a PvP-centric game.

4283

That’s why most WW2 games don’t work - too hard to tell what’s going on with all the white people with guns running around.

4284

The problem with GW2 pve is that it is a pure REP grind with random events that happen along the way of varying quality. Now, i admit that the rep grind in GW2 is better than the rep grind in wow, but at the end of the day, still a rep grind.

You aren’t saving the world, fighting back the orc hordes or enslaving hobbits, you’re rep grinding for farmer joe who wants you to kill 10 centaurs. A very few of these are interesting, but most i’ve seen are just bland kill quests. The hearts don’t even feel like quests like you would find in wow.

There is just so much grinding between actual interesting quests/events that it gets to me sometimes. I have generally liked the story quests personally (although they are nowhere near swtor or tsw) but they are in the vast minority to the farmer joe quests.

4285

I think it’s pretty clear where you stand on GW2, and that’s cool–different strokes, etc. I take a rather different view though of what you call a reputation grind. It’s made pretty clear in your tutorial levels that the society you start in is in desperate need of someone to help the common folks, and as a newly-minted hero, that someone is you. In the grand scheme of things you might be saving the world, but along the way (like in a novel, where it takes a long time to go from fledgling hero to world savior) there’s lots of useful stuff to do–and here, while you might be gathering bear ass, at least they go to some effort to make it make sense.

But really, why do we care? I guess intellectually I can see why people might want an MMORPG to have real role-playing and real ways the players can affect the world–along with internally consistent stories unfettered by the MMO mechanics–but I’m pretty sure such things ain’t gonna happen, at least, not in with games in the form we have them now. And I’m not that sure I want anything that much different in a multiplayer game like this. Solo RPGs, yeah, I’m all about the changing the world and having the world react to me. In an MMO? As long as I get fancier armor, can one-shot gray mobs, and have a way to show off to other players, it’s all good.

4286

Thanks for all the info. Despite knowing I should be moving around, for some reason my brain still thinks I can just wade in (and I haven’t touched a scepter/staff on her at all). With mesmer, I knew up front that it was a kiting class so I already knew ‘how to play’ to some extent. Kiting in heavy armor takes some mind twisting to get used to :)

EDIT: Holy cow. Staff was the key, as you hinted. Grabbed one of those, and suddenly I’m a crazy untouchable AoE machine. I reran an event that downed me multiple times the other night (granted, I’m a little higher level now, but downscaling equializes that some…) and the difference was night and day. In some ways I’m almost disappointed because now my mesmer has competition. The rate at which packs of mobs just melt is silly.

4287

Oh for fuck’s sake. Doing those yellow hearts takes all of 20-40 minutes from start to finish. Calling it a “grind” of any sort is either a gross misrepresentation or outright making shit up.

You aren’t saving the world, fighting back the orc hordes or enslaving hobbits, you’re rep grinding for farmer joe who wants you to kill 10 centaurs. A very few of these are interesting, but most i’ve seen are just bland kill quests.

Every single yellow heart has at least three paths to completion, be it kills, rezzing, collecting, or a combination. None are straight up kill quests. Which anyone who’s gone past level 4 can attest, of course. Again, just a sloppy and wrongheaded misrepresentation.

The hearts don’t even feel like quests like you would find in wow.

Yes. Thank goodness.

I giggle at folks referring to any sort of level grind in GW2. When WotLK came out, it took me at least 10 days of very dedicated playing to level from 70-80. In GW2, if you’re doing content appropriate to your level you can gain 2 levels or more in an evening of play. The day I dinged 80 I started at level 77 and did 2.8 levels in a matter of about 3 hours.

That’s not grind as compared to any other MMO I’ve ever played, and I have played them all.

4288

Yes. Neither WoW nor GW2 has anything even vaguely resembling a traditional level grind.

I didn’t play Everquest, but real level grind could be found in games like AO or FF XI. You form a perfect team, and you do exactly the same thing over and over again to optimize XP (that one particular dully mechanical random dungeon in AO, or edge-of-death landscape mob combat in FF XI). And you have to do it that way, because the optimal rate of XP income might get you a level every 4-8 hours of grinding eye-bleeding repetition, but if you do anything else, like soloing, exploring, or whatever, you could whistle in hell for enough XP to ever level.

In WoW at launch, you could solo the whole game with practically no time spent not on a quest. True, the quests were mostly repetitive, but they at least featured new zones, new mobs, new environments and so on. Moreover you could level quite quickly, maybe 5 times as fast as AO, or twenty times as fast as FF XI.

In GW2 you have lots of things to do to level, and going from level 75 to 80 took all of one play session for me, with a wide variety of different activities all gaining useful XP, from heart-quests to DEs to WvW to crafting. Crafting for a full level at level 75, for heaven’s sake.

Anyhow, you may well find the gameplay boring or repetitive even so. They still haven’t broken the basic leveling mold, and there comes a time when you have no great enthusiasm for the next kill. But I must say that at least it’s less boring and repetitive than leveling in most previous similar games.

Now that I’ve hit the cap and find that obtaining “legendary” weapons really does require a traditional grind to obtain the various required components, I have no great interest in taking that extra step. But up to that point, it’s a quick, easy, and relatively fun ride, with extra rewards for exploration.

4289

Yep, on my alts I’m actually forgetting about the story and just having fun wandering the world doing DEs and hearts. I’ll get to the stories but everything else is engaging.

4290

It has a scoring system, a territory system, a resource system that requires people to actively attack & defend key locations, and a host of other things that exist to make what you do in WvW actually relevant.

The 2 week resets? Great! A definitive end to each matchup doesn’t just enable rankings and allow for proper matchmaking, it gives the whole thing meaning. One of the bigger complaints about Planetside was that the endless war was just endless. Victories were ultimately meaningless. That isn’t the case in GW2, but it was the case in WoW.

Between this and your complaints about the levelling, I get the impression you’re about to come out with “all games are Pong”. A comparison between WvW and WoW’s world PVP is absurd.

WoW’s open world PvP was entertaining to me before the BGs opened, and the Tarren Mill stuff was entertaining (and in some ways like two groups in GW2 fighting in WvW) until it disappeared. If you didn’t like it, well, different strokes and all that.

I’m sure you enjoyed it. That doesn’t mean it’s comparable to WvW for a host of reasons. It wasn’t just meaningless in your “all games are ultimately meaningless” sense, it was meaningless in “everything you do literally has no point” sense. OK, they tried to change that once or twice with various personal scoring systems but most of those were awful. That’s what happens when you shoehorn PVP into a PVE game.

And I don’t think Blizzard “fucked it” when they tried to add open world PvP. I think that open world PvP just isn’t something that most players want, even if they profess otherwise. The mechanics were there in the expansions for selected areas, but the players decided they’d rather do PvE and get to the level cap.

That and the fact that PVP ‘balance’ was dreadful and the mechanics for those areas poorly thought out and poorly executed.

I’m still hoping that WvW eventually pops for me and becomes the reason I want to fire up GW2. So far it’s hit or miss, either some great battles or zoning in and spending a lot of time running around and wishing there were meaningful battles. I think one of the most surprising things about GW2 for me, not having done my due diligence before buying, is how PvE-centric it really is. I thought the rep for Guild Wars was it was a PvP-centric game.

Yeah you still get people going “GW2 IS A PVP GAME”. It’s whatever you want it to be, really - if you want it to be a purely PVP game then that works; ditto PVE.

I never played PVP in GW1 but it had extensive PVE so hey.

4291

Yesterday I took part in a rather different approach to WvW on our server. Four guilds all grouped up (on teamspeak) in a zerg, rampaging around a battlegrounds. I’d say there were between 50 and 100 of us (it was very hard to tell).

Combat involved all of us standing on the same 3 metre wide circle of ground, unable to see the enemies most of the time (too many friendly models meant that the hordes of enemies just never appeared on your screen). Sometimes we portaled our blob, sometimes we shuffled 2 feet out of the door and then back inside after a while and sometimes we flowed across the scenery in a moving tide of destruction.

It was definitely an experience but it was the least enjoyable WvW session I’ve taken part in. Being unable to see the enemy is about as much fun as it sounds - most of my damage was my AoE longbow attack. I rarely found a target for anything else.

It was a response to the enemy guilds doing something similar and wiping us all repeatedly in the hour or two previous. Usually our guilds roam in smaller, single guild packs and it’s great fun. Even large keep attacks/defences are usually a manageable number of players.

4292

…and no one thought to farm you with AE and arrowcarts/ballistae?

4293

Gee, sounds like huge keep defenses in DAOC. PBAOE on the door, healers facing the wall looking at the floor mashing buttons, melee sitting around doing nothing. Great fun…not.

4294

I assume the point of this is that any single AoE attack in WvW only affects a maximum of 5 targets. I assume that if there’s more than 5 targets the game picks the 5 affected at random. By putting so many people so close together the AoE gets distributed evenly and people can’t get focused down (and even if someone gets downed they probably can get revived nearly instantly by so many revivers standing there.

4295

These are not good reasons to be disappointed in the GW2 PvP.

Here are couple that could be taken more serious:

  1. Load balancing isn’t doing so well, you can and do have examples of extremely uneven sides.
  2. Queues to get in during prime-time (and your side still can be outnumbered while you are waiting in the queue)
  3. Only 2 WvW maps - borderlands and Eternal.
  4. Group loading issues - due to max chars loaded you can walk into an enemy group and not see them before you die. They need to implement step-by-step loading right away. Something where you see generic enemy right away, so you could target them, instead of waiting couple seconds (you could be dead by then) and load full model with gear, race and class shown.
  5. No mobile siege (aside from golem, that currently deemed to be too expensive) and no mulch-occupant mobile siege.
  6. Really lousy raid interface, unless you have a commander (100g) its hard to coordinate large groups.
4296

I run in a group of about 20, we have tried this approach and used 4 arrow carts, our AOE team and advanced scouts and a choke.

They still got through. Problem is that you don’t see. Imagine invisible 100 people army, that how bad loading issues are. You can spam all AOEs you want, but if you can’t see your enemy they get perfect jump on you every time, even if you know they are coming.

Add Mesmer portal on top of loading issues (why is there no throughput limit on this?!) and you can have this army port on top of you at any time. You die before any of them load. You don’t get targeted, but even blind AOE from the zerg will kill anything and everything in range.

I see this as a very serious problem.

4297

Yeah. It doesn’t even take huge numbers, or WvW, to see the issues with avatars not loading. If you go to one of the big dynamic events, you just have to learn where things spawn in because you may never see them. Sometimes running away and back can change what models are loaded, so you’ll see long dead enemies render in, then play their death animation.

It’s especially bad because corpses seem to count against the limit.

All in all, it’s a pretty shitty “optimization” for a game of this nature.

Oh, funny thing, it DOESN’T do that sort of culling for a lot of non-mobile objects. There was a bug in the bandit caves outside Divinity’s Reach last week where thousands of bombs (the kind you can pick up) were spawned in on top of each other, and it was murdering the framerate.

4298

Is that what that was! I thought there was something wrong with my video card. I was in there last night on one of my low level alts and could barely move.

4299

Oh man… thanks for that info. I was in the same caves last night and similarly got mauled framerates. I was a little worried my card was overheating, though it resumed being normal once I left the cave. Had no idea it was bombs or whatever doing it.

4300

Yep, that was the reason for the blob approach - 50 - 100 people sharing heals, buffs and being able to revive each other if they go down. They’d need to target a lot of AoE on us before it would make much difference (I think it would have been effective without the 5 target rule, but that definitely helped).

As I say, not a fun way to play.