It has been just around a month since I began playing Guild Wars 2 (which I gave a brief summary of my background with this game). Being a new player (where everything is initially new and fresh) in a game that has been on the market for 7 years gives me a better appreciation of new players who are beginning their own journeys in titles that I’ve been playing for awhile. You see veteran players with the nifty costumes, pets, and mounts (or skins) while you are just trying to get ahold of the basics. Myself, I know my character has that barebones newbie look; I have one cosmetic from the Path of Fire Ultimate edition as well as the Heart of Thorns themed cosmetic that ArenaNet is giving away for free for a limited time in the shop (below).
I knew about some of the gripes that long time players have with both ArenaNet and GW2 though but have not let that get in the way of my enjoying my playtime (which again is mostly about progressing via exploration which this game has a lot of). As is expected with most MMO’s, the leveling is a mere time sink and very basic tutorial to the very beginning of the end game grind (once you hit max level). Some folks push to do end game content (dungeons, raids, open world bosses, etc to max out the capabilities of their characters).
That part of GW2 was not a primary objective once I hit level 80. The game offers other objectives which I can shoot for (masteries being one of them) including the grind for the flying mount. I’ve managed to get to tier 3 for the raptor, springer, and skimmer while I just got the jackal (which is optional).
I decided to get it since I managed to make my way through all of the annoying mobs while exploring the western portion of “The Desolation” map. Tier 3 on the jackal mastery track opens up access to those sand portals (providing faster transport as well as access to inaccessible areas including locations with mastery points). Basically, it provides more explorable content (right up my alley) but can also provide QoL conveniences.
As an example for the following mastery point, I needed to use the tier 3 springer to jump up the side of a cliff (once you’ve found the right spots to launch from and land on) to get to the platform with that ramp you see to reach top of the pillar with the mastery point. With a tier 3 jackal, I could’ve simply used a sand portal located at ground level to quickly get to one seen in the back of the image, and run over.
I mix things up a bit by occasionally progression through both expansions. Originally, I was planning to play through Heart of Thorns (HoT) first BUT changed my mind when there were these breaks in the progression where I needed to unlock certain mastery tracks first in order to continue the next chapter. Plus I also wasn’t playing through Living World Season (LWS) 2 and had already done the first mission in Path of Fire (PoF) to at least unlock the raptor (since running around on foot through HoT maps simply wasn’t fun).
So bits and pieces of the story are all over the place for me where it doesn’t matter anymore. I’m also not a fan of the HoT maps whereas the PoF ones have a wide variety of environments to take in (and am finding the mastery progression much better for my exploration). Plus I wanted to make the 2 weeks of additional mastery experience count where I would most benefit from (which is PoF ones). I also purchased (due to the current sale) LWS3 and LWS4 since those unlock new areas. As a result, I’m nearly complete with PoF (Chapter 11: Beast of War chapter) compared to HoT (Chapter 8: City of Hope).
It doesn’t mean I haven’t come across some of the complaints regarding the game (I have like the game failing to save progression in story instances even though there are checkpoints; where you have to start over from the beginning if you get disconnected/crash or leave because you didn’t realize it would consume more time than expected and you had to take care of other things – most of the bosses take a lot of time) or one of my own personal beefs is how level 80 mobs are pretty much zerg rush ganksters in their design (I can actually see how some of their designers thought of the most annoying ways to prevent players from exploring the level 80 areas without constantly getting pecked at by something). I thought Mordrem in the HoT maps were bad. Brand and Forged in PoF maps are degrees more annoying. It does make me appreciate how some of the things I found annoying in TERA, seem like trivial non-issues in comparison.
Digressing back to this zerg rush design, I mean both ways too; with more difficult mobs, you’ll see players zerg rush them while if you are running around solo, will find mobs ganking you off your mount, quickly running over and stun-locking your character while you are barbequeing in a DoT fire that it layed down, and then having more of them zerg rushing your character (I’m working my Crystal Champion mastery track to improve mount health and endurance). You have zombies throwing poison from ranged or other ones leeching life from you; the worst ones are the small ones that you can’t easily see until you stop to view the map, and notice something pecking at you.
The mob aggro is really sensitive and they can be a distance away where you just trigger them by your presence (it is sometimes downright hilarious with how cheap some of these monster mechanics are where you pretty much have to tip toe around if you aren’t in a zerg group running events or bounties in these areas). I often times use my skimmer now so that I can gain altitude and try to find a ledge/cliff where I can temporarily park just to look at my map to either place a personal waypoint (so I can at least generally head in the right direction since the mini-map is pretty useless).
Part of this is why working towards the flying mounts is a longer term goal (since you can fly over a lot of this) which I am taking in stride since I’m only a month into the game. I thought the 20 gold (plus 200 trade contracts) was expensive for the jackal. The griffon is 200 gold (after you collect all of the stuff needed). I don’t even want to think about what it is going to take to get the skyscale (I haven’t looked into the details of what it takes to get either of these).
Besides these minor quibbles though, the explorable content in this game is mad crazy. It would’ve been perfect if the entire game world was truly open (there are portals between zones since zones are instanced given how large each of them are; like you can jump to the top of a cliff and see the textures end; you can’t navigate over the tops of mountains to the neighboring zone like you can in ArcheAge or TERA as examples). It’s alright though because of the massive size of each of these areas. I am most definitely having fun and progressing at a somewhat leisurely pace. And with LWS5 coming next week, I’ll probably be playing that to unlock whatever new areas are available while the episodes are live (and thus free).
