Most of my postings regarding my first month of progress in Guild Wars 2 (as a new player) has been mostly positive (including the latest Icebrood Saga with the Bound by Blood prologue); that is mostly a function of how I’ve been playing though which had been primarily running around the world to level up via exploration (and completing the personal story) in addition to doing only PvE. I did briefly mention in that post that not everything has been a positive playing experience (plus I also noted that there would be a point in that journey, where the “freshness” would wear off). I really wanted to expand more on that but decided it was better to do that in a separate posting (this one).
Playing through the story content of both expansions as well as Living World Season (LWS) 3 and 4 episodes (where you need to be the current max level of 80), has allowed me to experience some designs that I don’t find appealing (and ones that are used repeatedly). I was primarily playing Path of Fire (PoF) maps to take advantage of the double mastery experience that ArenaNet was running for the month prior to the launch of Icebrood Saga since I felt it would benefit me more there (I managed to get tier 4 on all PoF mastery tracks except the rolling beetle mount which I haven’t unlocked). I completed PoF where I found the final fight with Balthazar, anti-climatic (a result of the way most boss fights are designed, which is expanded on below).
As I noted in the above first link posting, it’s become hilarious with how cheap many of these mechanics are because you pretty much know once you enter these level 80 maps, those mobs will be triggered at the sight/smell/sound of any players character that dare to enter their territory (I might as well have a sense of humor in this area; so I sometimes go back in time when adventure role playing games were text based and you used your imagination to visualize the dungeons and the monsters within – in this case, I imagine these monsters in GW2 discussing amongst themselves how to best deal with these invading heroes who can’t seem to mind their own business and stick to the comforts of the places they came from).
Getting to most mastery points or vistas in these level 80 maps require traversing locations with some of the most annoying mob types that wants to force engage combat via some form of ranged damage that often times kills your mount (and you can’t re-mount until you lose aggro/get into an out-of-combat stance); stopping for just a moment to check your world map and you’ll likely find something pecking at you, and once you get to that location, there is bound to be at least one veteran (and regulars) that you need to take care of before you can peacefully interact with them (and normally once you engage said veteran, it will aggro the other normal mobs hanging around the area – and you want to do this quickly before something re-spawns and you end up in this endless loop).
Some of these designs which I find annoying are related to personal preferences BUT are also some of the things I heard other (long time) players complain about (but put to the side since I did not want these things to detract from the enjoyment of being able to level up and then experience the level 80 game play for myself). Unfortunately, I can now see where some of these long time players negativity comes from (and this isn’t even about actual end game content).
One of the main offender for myself are the final boss battles (in most chapters) where they tend to be long and drawn out (I guess with an intention of making them feel challenging, difficult, and epic). Unfortunately, they don’t feel anything like that; I feel that most of these were designed for party play where solo, it just ends up being a 20+ minute slog of annoying tedium given the amount of AoE and mechanics often times happening in a small space (where some of it becomes unavoidable).
When running many of these story instances solo, you tend to end up doing down often (the downed player mechanic means you don’t immediately die; you have a chance to “rally” back). What happens more often though as is that you do end up dying a lot. So the whole “downed” process (unless you are in a large open world zerg group where a bunch of players can quickly revive you), becomes an extra time sink. And unlike dying in the open world, you usually don’t have to deal with repairing armor (the only penalty is the fact that you are out of combat adding time to an already stupid long fight where dying has no real consequences except chewing up time). See where I am getting back with this notion of added “time sinks”. Sometimes, an NPC (if they are accompanying the player during the quest) can revive you. If not, you have the option of reviving at the last checkpoint.
Most of these checkpoints are short runs back to get back into combat (if it’s the last boss, you usually revive on the spot). It’s a rinse and repeat process for these parts of the story quests in the expansions and Living World Seasons. I’m also not advocating that death be more punishing without changes to monster health and mechanics (it’s moot anyway since these are years old designs that ArenaNet has been okay with). What I am seeing is this underlying theme of annoyance (like open world monsters pecking at you or in the case of level 80’s, yanking you off your mount and then zerging you) in their mechanics where after awhile, this part of the gameplay comes across as more than just a nuisance; it is downright irritating. Most mobs have excessive amounts of hit points as well as a lack of cooldown in their crowd control abilities to make you the pay the price if you aren’t part of a zerg-rush party.
There’s a point where those encounters (when you are running solo) are no longer fun and engaging though because after awhile, you just accept and laugh about it (in most games, I try to minimize dying – in GW2 though, I just go with the flow in these story instances and just let it be when it is clear that I am about to be stun locked AoE nuked with my i-frame on cooldown or not having enough endurance to do another dodge roll). A couple of times, I had to actually take care of some stuff and just left my character AFK where it was constantly being revived by an NPC and then dying again (repeating the revive process) for over 45 minutes. Thankfully, the boss doesn’t reset (except for some quests where it does bug out and resumes at full health again). Basically, I am finding most all of these boss fights to be poorly designed by someone with masochistic tendencies because they end up feeling long just for the sake of being long.
The final boss fight against Balthazar in Path of Fire was anti-climatic because it was one where I could actually dodge or jump to evade damage (unlike most of the rest where it is just far too much AoE, crowd control, adds, and ground effects spammage). Even the preceding battle against the warbeast in the prior chapter was slow going because you have a portion of that fight where you cannot damage it until you defeat all of the adds that have been spawned (and some of the veterans have fear as their crowd control where you end up losing precious DPS time; the worse is when they fear you directly underneath the warbeast as it is about to do its slam which means insta-death). This happens for several rotations once it is below 50% health until is almost dead. That fight with the warbeast took far longer/involved more tedium/deaths than the final fight with Balthazar. I only died once during that fight (while trying to figure out the mechanic to coordinate my attack with Aurene). After figuring it out, it was smooth sailing; thus the anti-climatic feeling as I was really expecting it to be another drawn out die-revive-die festival (thankfully it wasn’t).
Some of these story instances also have those get quickly from point A to B puzzles while the floor tiles randomly turn into fire (where the fire is also naturally a DoT), mazes that you have to navigate to press a button within a set amount of time while avoiding lightning that stuns and damages you (and also puts whatever health regen skill you use on a short cooldown). My RPG roots has me enjoying puzzle content as part of the game play BUT I also feel it shouldn’t be overdone to the point of becoming overtly frustrating to solve (where not getting past them after several tries, halts your progression) or end up being overused.
What’s worse is if you crash or quit out of these instances, you get to start all over from the beginning based on an internal checkpoint that does not match up to the checkpoints used for reviving. To me, if you are going to put puzzles like this in an instance, progress should at least be snapshot to where you were last successful. I had to quit out of the “Be My Guest” quest (the one with the laser traps, fire tiles, the combined laser/fire floor section, and the final room where you have a similar puzzle as well as fire floor tiles mechanic (on top of the usual long boss fight). This entire episode (3 – Long Live the Lich) is seriously one of the most awful combinations of game play that I’ve experienced in awhile. I can now see why some players choose to not fully complete some of these episodes.
I thought some of this might have been just me but as I looked through years old videos on YouTube and read some of the comments, I realized it wasn’t me. Some folks even mentioned they don’t think ArenaNet knows what their doing (I actually believe the designers know exactly what they are doing; they don’t want players to easily explore the world or to clear the final boss content). So they end up thinking up the most obnoxious ideas.
There are also some story quests that you perform in the actual open world where you may have other players also trying to complete the same objectives. Unfortunately in a lot of MMO’s, you have the common issue of having to wait for mobs or gathering nodes to re-spawn; that just comes with the territory. It’s maddening though when you have a puzzle quest to do and have other players (or yourself), actually affecting others. A perfect example of this was the Invariant Enclave Lab (LWS 4 Episode 2) puzzle quest with the portals (that you need to manipulate in order to activate the door access on each platform) in Rata Primus. At first, I thought mine and other players actions on the control panels weren’t going to impact each other (that what I was seeing was client side based only on my actions similar to how you only see certain effects or NPC’s only on your client when stepping through portions of the story that take place in the open world). Wrong! Another player came in and did what must have been their final door activation because I saw them write “I hope I didn’t mess up someone elses sequence…” before leaving for the next part of the quest. I guess they had tried completing it before but had to deal with other players trying to accomplish the same (messing each other up in the process), and came back to try again. There were two other players along with myself trying to solve the puzzle (and I kept wondering why I wasn’t getting on the next platform). After that other players message, I realized that yes, that the actions aren’t independent/unique for each player.
That is a lousy design decision to say the least because it isn’t made obvious (lack of conveyance) that the console action applies to everyone there. After that, I left the area to do something else (I returned a few hours later with no one else there and quickly completed the final 2 door activations in the puzzle). I can only imagine how this must have been when this episode was actually new and had a lot of players in the area trying to accomplish the same task (but on different steps of the puzzle). I was hoping that some of the negativity regarding certain aspects of the game were the usual long time jaded players ones but as I am finding, there are some deliberate choices to those designs (made annoying on purpose/almost as a crutch).
My last complaint has nothing to do with the actual game play; it is how there is no user interface to view guilds in the game. That one blew my mind considering the game is called “Guild Wars 2”. I thought it was initially a level related thing but I eventually learned there was no such interface to search or look at guilds. If you wanted to join one, you used chat (players from guilds often times post recruitment messages or you can simply post a looking for guild message yourself). Other times, some guilds will send an invite to guildless players they see. Once you get an invite, you can then see the details of that guild (where you can decide if you want to accept or decline the invite). I decided to just create my own dummy guild since I’m not going to be active enough to participate in guild related activities.
While this post regarding the negatives (based on only one month of play) is long, the amount of explorable content (which is helped by the fact that I’m experiencing 7 years worth of content in 2019) does offset most of this given how I chose to play. My opinion would obviously be different if I were actively doing end game metas as well as GvG and/or WvW content (according to what I’ve read, this area of the game hasn’t been treated well) or if I had been playing this from beginning or at least several years. My point is that for casual players, just the core (free to play) game with Central Tyria, is vast with degrees of accessible verticality. What really opens the game up though are your ability to glide and mount (the more complex pre-mount puzzle content usually has mounts disabled and will warn you about being dismounted when entering one of these areas). Where the usual game issues begin to reveal themselves are once you hit max level and begin progression through that content; where at least for me, it’s a mixed bag (nothing new as far as I’m concerned).
