No, I never said “once you learn it, you will for sure enjoy it”. I am puzzled how you could read my posts like that. I don’t think I ever talked about your enjoyment at all.
But if you want to talk about enjoyment and to stop you from guessing, my opinion is that it’s hard to enjoy a part of the game if one doesn’t quite understand how it works and dies all the time. If I was doing “graveyard zergs” all the time, I wouldn’t like it either.
That’s the only thing I am saying. Whether one would enjoy the learning process or enjoy playing the game after learning it, it’s all highly individual.
Throughout your posts you seem to focus on “learning” aspect of this. I will make an educated guess is that you would define “learning” along the lines of effectively using your character’s abilities and learning to appropriately using them to defeat specific encounter.
No, I wouldn’t define “learning” like that. You would. :)
What I mean by “learning” is three-fold and these three “learnings” are progressively harder. Learn your character (basically, what abilities you have and how to use them), learn the environment (basically, what enemies can do to your character and how to deal with it), learn your group (basically, what your group - including you - can or should do in different situations).
Second part, “appropriately using them to defeat specific encounter”, is where we disagree. I think that Anet design is flawed in this aspect, putting to much pressure on specifics on learning to jumps through the hoops of a specific dungeon and not enough on generalizing knowledge of how to effectively use your character. As such, it creates a result where “learning to play” is almost entirely is learn to play that specific dungeon. This generally done in following ways - out of game learning, learning by observation or trial and error. Former two are “effort” and to me are signs of bad design.
We can’t disagree on that because I never said that. Actually, I would say it’s completely opposite - in GW2, once you’ve completed the “three disciplines” I listed above, you DON’T need to learn particular encounters or dungeons (well, except for the boss fights, every game nowadays seems to come up with some tricky boss mechanics). You will know how to deal with those archers or necros or knockdowns or whatever no matter where and when you encounter them.
BTW, if you don’t want to learn by observation, I don’t know how you lpay games then. :)
WoW suffered from this malady a great deal in its Raid design, but dungeon content was surprisingly generalizable. You learned to effectively use your character and this was enough to complete the content.
“Effectively use your character” is different in WOW and GW2. In WoW, it’s enough to know your role. “Do your rotation and don’t stand in fire” for a dps, for example.
In GW2, it’s not enough to do your damage and mitigate your damage. Everyone have to use everything they’ve got. One moment you are damaging the mob, the next moment you will heal your teammate, then you would knock back another mob, then you would blind a mob. You would put up a reflective wall if some archer is shooting at your teammate, you would put up a protection buff if someone gets hammered. And so on.
In reality, not everyone has to perform at 100% all the time, of course. I would guess that if everyone in the group performs at 70%, it’s more than enough. If someone is at 50% for whatever reason, the rest of the group needs to pick up and perform at 80% or whatever. The numbers are for illustrative purposes only, of course, as there is no way to measure stuff like that. :)
In WoW, if you healer sucks or your tank, the entire group is screwed and nothing can be done about it. Not in GW2 - here, there is a lot less accent on individual performance but a lot more depends on a group as a whole.
This is problematic when you look at casual-friendly focus elsewhere in the game. It sets expectations that you can go into any activity, and given adequate level of “effectively using your character’s abilities” can succeed.
You made it very clear that you don’t see all of the above as a problem, but you have to concede that GW2 dungeon design is inconsistent with the rest of the game.
I agree that GW2 dungeons are not casual friendly and require some basic “effort” that you hate so much. :)
However, I don’t understand what you mean by “inconsistent”. All the different parts of GW2 are inconsistent with each other to a certain extend. tPVP requires TONS of communication, planning and learning (much more than dungeons, for example), and has absolutely nothing to do with “regular PvE”. sPvP and WvW require less but have also very little in common with “regular PvE”.
The only thing that makes sPvP and WvW so accessible to casual players is zerg - your individual skill or your party’s skill doesnt’ matter at all in a zerg. Go solo in WvW or with a couple of friends and you will soon realize how little your “casual PvE” prepared you for it.
Not everything in the game is “easy breazy, here is the medal just for coming” kind of activity. Whether you like it or not, many parts of the game require a lot of learning to be effective.
You might not like it and that’s fine, the only question is whether there is a lot of people that do like it.
