At 8000 hours in, I think It's time for feedback!

[Crit.5123]

After over 8000 hours of Guild Wars 2 I feel it's about time I shared my opinions and what I have learnt during my journey, what is great and what could be done better. This could possibly turn into a long read so either strap in or jump ship now! 🙂

I read these forums on a regular basis but very rarely get involved in discussions or topics of contention. So thought I would add my small contribution and shove a massive thank you in the way of the developers for a game that not only kept me sane throughout the worldwide Covid pandemic, but allowed me to meet some lifelong (hopefully) friends along the way!

Is it perfect, of course not. There is very little in the world that is, but the positives outweigh the negatives ten fold. What follows is my list of what I enjoy, my suggestions on improvements, and the few things that I feel should be changed without delay :).

For clarity my main focus is PvE with around 95% of my game time is focused on this mode. I occasionality dip into WvW when I need a GoB but as for PvP the toxic nature that surrounds it and the queue times keep me away almost permanently. Within PvE I now focus most of my game time on end game content, having over 3000Li and 50+ kp of each EoD strike cm (excluding HTcm of which I have less). This is not a flex, just for context on the content on which my opinions are based.

Raids

I enjoy these a lot. I'm lucky enough to be part of a small endgame community who clear these weekly, we still have to rely on LFG to a degree, but I've managed a clear of all 7 wings for a long time (2 years or so). CM's are tuned nicely and offer an increased challenge if you want them for more organised groups.

I didn't like the change to the CM rewards that happened a while ago. This seemed counter intuitive to allowing more people access to raids. As now most groups on LFG will want to do all CM's (ex Dhuum and Q1 usually) instead of just 5, blocking access even further for newer raiders. Emboldened mode did alleviate this a little, but it's used very rarely and getting into raids for a new player is as hard as it ever was (if not harder after the CM changes).

What I dislike most about raids though is the rewards structure. There is no incentive to run them more than once a week, so unless you can raid on a Monday finding clears is difficult. Put a W5-7 FC up on a Thursday, good luck getting it filled. Raids should as a matter of priority be given an incentive for players to repeat them more than once. Maybe something like a weekly achievement that gives 50g for 50 raid boss kills (this is just an idea but you get my point). LFG would be more active, raiding through the week would be easier and give more access for newer players, and I don't think 50g would break the economy, everybody wins.


Strikes

While I do enjoy these a lot they have undergone massive changes in philosophy over the past 2 years, all of which I'm not sure I fully agree with. Take IBS strikes, all rather easy apart from Bonskinner which for new players takes a bit of getting used to. Then we had EoD. In normal mode there is 2 easy ish ones and two which are a pretty big barrier for newer players. Then we look at the CM's, AH and XJJ are not too bad, doable by most end game focused groups. KO is then a huge step up in difficulty, a lot of end game raiders still do not have a single kill of this, and then of course there is HTcm. Harvest temple challenge mode was overkill on a huge scale. While I do agree that crazy hard content does appeal to the minority, for the vast number of players this kind of approach to content just blocks accessibility. In my opinion every piece of new content should be aimed at three different groups of players.

Normal Mode : Clearable by mostly everyone, with maybe a little bit of practice.
Challenge Mode : Clearable by the majority of end game focused players.
Title : An extra extreme challenge for title within the CM, that people can grind for weeks/months if the like.

 

ToFcm for example is a failure on a massive scale. Sure it generated some twitch views and some excitement for a week or two while everyone watched Hs and SC but 99.9% of the community was left out in the cold, and still is. Normal mode is fine, maybe a bit of a HP sponge but apart from this it's a well tuned fight. CM is overturned a lot, even after the 'nerf'. HPs are still way too high, the mechanics are far too punishing and most people just don't even bother with it already, just a few weeks after launch. Changes to the mechanics need to happen in order to make this fight accessible to the majority of the end game community.

I know people complained about COcm being 'too easy'. Personally I think its close to perfect. CM can be punishing if you are not focused on end game content and just 'jump in' but what it is missing is an extreme challenge for more elite players. This should have been tied to a title of some sort that would take some time to master and work out. This way everybody wins again.


Story

It's pretty good, once. Dialogue is on point, the story arcs work well and are engaging, I mostly enjoyed it and had a fun time on my first play-through. After that it becomes a tedious and annoying blocker for what mainly boils down to one reason. Dialogue is not skippable. Want to play through again on that 2^nd character, be prepared to listen to Taimi and Braham for 20+ hours that you cannot skip or ignore. It becomes so tedious and dull that I find myself shouting “Taimi just shut up” at the monitor on more occasions than I can count. This approach to story design is a fatal flaw that has plagued GW2 for a long time and continues to do so.


Content Delivery

This kind of pairs with story but as content is more than just story it deserves its own separate heading. HoT, PoF, EoD were all fantastic, big content dumps, lots of story, lots of content all made each one seem worth waiting for. SotO's drip fed approach is the total opposite. I don't like it at all, waiting 18/24 months for the next big content drop is not a problem, there is plenty of game already to keep people occupied while we wait. Season of the Dragon's while a band aid idea was fantastic. More things like this between big content drops would be an awesome approach. What we have now of an hour or two of story every 3 months and half a map, does not work for me at all. I would have preferred it all at once when it's ready so I can sit down and get stuck into some fleshed out content!


Game Balance

This is a contentious issue, everyone has a different opinion with different goals and wants. Me personally, I think we are pretty close to things being 'good'. A lot of focus has been placed on buffing various heal builds recently, this is only a good thing. The HFB/Druid meta got shaken up. HAM arrived with EoD, hScrapper is pretty awesome now, hScg getting alacrity was a nice touch, even heal warrior with a bonk stick is nice. BoonDPS still needs some work I feel. A lot of them still do not have access to some critical boons that they are usually asked to cover alongside their main one, stability and /or aegis being the usual culprits. Take qHarbi, a fantastic and engaging quickness provider that is fun to play but lacks stability access so it almost always gets sidelined and a herald/scrapper/fb taken instead. This needs to be worked on and the boon access of these sidelined classes tweaked so they can become a firm part of the meta. There are of course more examples of this, but this was the first that came to mind.

As for DPS classes, this is a mixed bag. I play with a disability to my left hand so I almost always run a Li build of some sort. Mechanist/Vindicator/Scourge are all good examples of these but all have received nerfs of some kind over the past year or so. Why? Because they were too good? No, their bench was no higher that some of the top performing DPS build, they were nerfed because people complained. Yes I hear you that complex builds should perform better than simple ones, but I disagree. If I see a scourge hitting 40k it's nice but I'm not impressed. If I see a cata doing it, then this is impressive, I almost always mention this to the player and congratulate them on their awesome performance with a difficult class. This should be the difference.

Let's use Mehanist as an example as it is the class with the most headlines over the past year or so. There was soo much hate towards it from a minority of people that it was nerfed and nerfed into oblivion. To the point that pMech is almost not viable for end game content and a lot of groups just flat out refuse to take one if they join from LFG. This is bad design. I just never understand the hate. Maybe it needed tweaking slightly, but what happened was bad for the game and for players. Pmech introduced a LOT of players to end game content. Maybe they have a disability like me, or maybe they have concentration issues making mechanics + a hard rotation difficult. Pmech solved all of these, so many people got to experience end game content for the first time because of this class, and instead of us celebrating this as a community it was just slammed into the ground by people complaining that my condi weaver does not let me flex any more.

Moving away from classes and focusing on mechanics balance. Currently the big elephant in the room is ToFcm, and while there is no need to go into big detail I would like to point out one thing. Visual noise. GW2 has a lot of this, like a whole lot. And balancing mechanics around small things that people need to see is a poor approach. Using the greens as an example, there are three of them (depending on the strat you take ofc). Each one has a small spinning indicator around it to see if enough people are inside. This is super hard to see with everything else that is happening on screen. If the whole green circle turned blue when three people were inside (and then maybe pink if there were more than 3) this would solve the problem instantly (with maybe a colourblind menu option also). There are a lot more examples of this in the game, and visual indicators for critical mechanics need to be made more easily visible as a matter of priority imo.


Performace

GW2 is old, over a decade since release and it shows. Not in how it looks, I still think this stands up well and large parts of the game look beautiful. But the performance still needs more addressing. Take the Wizards Tower as an example. New content and the FPS are really poor here, whatever approach is being taken to designing new maps needs looking at. I don't have a top end rig, but a 9700k + 4070 should be able to supply me with more than 25fps in a 'town' area. And convergences, eeek. I've seen it dip as low as 12fps when everyone is bonking the Sorrow. Content should be designed around the engine and performance you have, and convergences does not work. 50 players all within a 600 radius of each other and a boss going bananas is a recipe for disaster.


Conclusion

I love GW2, I mean really love it. It has helped me though some difficult periods in my life and I have met some fantastic people along the way. I do feel that some more Dev focus should be applied to fixing bugs that have been around for a long time, some just get overlooked and ignored. (KOcm 33% phasing for example) but on the whole I think what we have is a fantastic and engaging game that has kept me hooked for 8000 hours and will continue to do so. My opinions are of course my own, it's ok for yours to be different. Everyone has differing views on what would make the game perfect, and I guess the Dev's have the difficult job of finding a middle ground that keeps us all happy.

I could have gone into a lot more detail with crafting, gem store, legendary access etc.. but these were the main points from where the majority of my focus lies within the game. I just though it was about time to get my points/ideas across and once again drop a massive thank you to all the developers past and present. Ya'll are doing good ;).

Edited March 27 by Crit.5123

[BlueJin.4127]

After 8,000 hours, I don't think you're going to get your "fee back." XD

Edited March 28 by BlueJin.4127

[Crit.5123]

haha, edit done. ty 😄 

[Krajtin.8956]

I very much agree with all points. To clarify, the low quality/quantity that SoTo offers us, except Cerus CM, is mainly due to the new game that Anet is developing.

It is evident that the money generated by GW2 are not in GW2.

I also have to say that we don't know how much money NCsoft offers Anet. We know that NCsoft has a bad reputation....

We only have to wait for the third mini-expansion (that is, LW) to know the future of GW2

Edited March 27 by Krajtin.8956

[Inculpatus cedo.9234]

Not being an end-game or min-max focused player (I only do some Strikes), I wish I knew what all the abbreviations stood for.

[DanAlcedo.3281]

2 hours ago, Krajtin.8956 said:

I very much agree with all points. To clarify, the low quality/quantity that SoTo offers us, except Cerus CM, is mainly due to the new game that Anet is developing.

It is evident that the money generated by GW2 are not in GW2.

I also have to say that we don't know how much money NCsoft offers Anet. We know that NCsoft has a bad reputation....

We only have to wait for the third mini-expansion (that is, LW) to know the future of GW2

Proof? 

Give them links that proof Anet is making another game. 

Gimme!

Edited March 27 by DanAlcedo.3281

[Krajtin.8956]

2 hours ago, DanAlcedo.3281 said:

Proof? 

Give them links that proof Anet is making another game. 

Gimme!

https://boards.greenhouse.io/arenanet/jobs/5488580

All these works started after EoD

https://web.archive.org/web/20221127015324/https://boards.greenhouse.io/arenanet/

 

 

Edited March 27 by Krajtin.8956

[DanAlcedo.3281]

6 minutes ago, Krajtin.8956 said:

https://boards.greenhouse.io/arenanet/jobs/5488580

All these works started after EoD

You actually gave me a link. 

What a Chad. 

[Sobx.1758]

3 hours ago, Inculpatus cedo.9234 said:

Not being an end-game or min-max focused player (I only do some Strikes), I wish I knew what all the abbreviations stood for.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Abbreviations

 

5 hours ago, Crit.5123 said:

Maybe something like a weekly achievement that gives 50g for 50 raid boss kills (this is just an idea but you get my point). LFG would be more active, raiding through the week would be easier and give more access for newer players, and I don't think 50g would break the economy, everybody wins.

Not a fan of an idea like this, I doubt it would really make lfg that much more active, aside of people grinding out a single raid encounter on a timer for some optimized gph.

5 hours ago, Crit.5123 said:

SotO's drip fed approach is the total opposite. I don't like it at all, waiting 18/24 months for the next big content drop is not a problem, there is plenty of game already to keep people occupied while we wait.

And here I agree. I'd rather wait longer for an expansion and get it as a whole than get it cut into pieces and then partially delivered every few months like they do it with soto. By the time we got the latest update, I already wasn't even interested in it.

Edited March 27 by Sobx.1758

[illuminati.8453]

Very thorough, well done. You are very insightful and clearly have a good handle on the state of the game.

Many people will agree with your points, as do I.  I particularly appreciate your emphasis on accessibility to all content.  If ArenaNet is aiming to provide value to their players, especially with their current focus on a smaller developer team, ensuring that all of their extensive content is accessible to players of all skill levels would be a significant step forward.  In other MMOs, I engage in raids and dungeons, but in this game, I find myself avoiding them.  It's not because I dislike that sort of content!

I applaud your feedback, Crit.  I only hope that ArenaNet gives posts like yours the consideration they deserve.

  

[SuavePuppy.2809]

I don't want to derail and make the whole thread about it, but I'll just try to touch on pMech.

I think it got nerfed more than it needed to be. I have no problem with LI builds - I'm a Condi Shortbeast enjoyer when I'm feeling lazy. But it was simply performing much better than it should have been based on the effort required and how safely it did it's damage. It wasn't outperforming other classes, but it was so over centralizing that seeing a squad with 8 mechs was common, if not expected. One of the issues with this for me is the amount of visual noise that it added to squads - up to 8 extra big green guys just taking up space.

Virtuoso has many of the same problems in my opinion, and should've been taken down a notch a while ago. I think there should be tradeoffs for DPS classes. In my opinion, highly volatile, risky, and complex classes should have a higher ceiling than relatively safe and easy classes like pMech, Scourge, or Virtuoso. It gives people an extra incentive to actually invest time into those classes instead of autopiloting towards the path of least resistance. I've asked myself many times why I bother even trying to play my Weaver when other classes perform just as well with much less risk.

Again though, I think pMech was hit too hard, but I feel some of the complaints were valid.

[Gehenna.3625]

I don't necessarily agree with EoD being a large chunk of content. Sure it had 2 more zones than SoTO but it still felt lacklustre and empty in a way that the previous two epxansions didn't. In the end I don't just judge expansions on how much content they come with from the start but also the replay value is important. And in that EoD and SoTO are about the same for me: currently I rarely come to either of these areas. I have no reason to farm there.

As a sidenote, I'm not into structured group content but EoD was also the first expansion that didn't offer any raids.

[Chyro.1462]

Pretty much agree with everything that has been said in the first post. Very nice read, thanks 😄

[Randulf.7614]

8 hours ago, Inculpatus cedo.9234 said:

Not being an end-game or min-max focused player (I only do some Strikes), I wish I knew what all the abbreviations stood for.

ikr

[Dibit.6259]

In regards to pmech, its apparently back in the game with sword/pistol combo.

[Sobx.1758]

40 minutes ago, Randulf.7614 said:

ikr

Not again

[Your Highness.9023]

Yes, make mech great again!

[Reznov.5423]

Tofcm is fine. Nothing wrong with content that only appeals to tryhards once in a while. 

[Crit.5123]

Thank you for the replys everyone and the kind words and feedback to my comments. Apologies for the abbreviations, I sometimes forget that not everyone knows what HAM, ToF, GoB etc... mean. I can only apologize for this.

@Sobx.1758 You are probably correct with your thoughts that people would just min max the same boss 50 times, it was only a suggestion though (in hindsight probably a bad one :D). I just think somthing needs to be done to get players engaging in raids on more days than Monday. Maybe a daily raid wing that gives between 5-10g or some extra Li etc.. Just anything to get people playing the content more than once per week and get LFG more active.

[HotDelirium.7984]

My feedback is that I want them to treat Guild Wars 2 as a competitive title and not some indy game.  Where are the cutscenes? The cinematics? More merch? Novels? Marketting? More dev talks? etc

[Helliwolf the KrimsonKnight.6523]

On 3/27/2024 at 9:29 AM, Sobx.1758 said:

 

 

Not a fan of an idea like this, I doubt it would really make lfg that much more active, aside of people grinding out a single raid encounter on a timer for some optimized gph.

And here I agree. I'd rather wait longer for an expansion and get it as a whole than get it cut into pieces and then partially delivered every few months like they do it with soto. By the time we got the latest update, I already wasn't even interested in it.

I see this problem a lot in the GW2 community. People want to binge all of the new content in the first two weeks to a month and then spend the next year til the next LWS/Expansion complaining how there is nothing to do and the game is dead.

Just take your time with stuff and enjoy it. I think Anet gave it a good try, but by dividing the content people were going to binge in 2-4 weeks into quarters and then releasing it every three months still lead to the same problem.

Maybe they can try a monthly release schedule with the next expansion or something. But you can't really please everyone, so I think ya'll will still complain.

[Sobx.1758]

30 minutes ago, Helliwolf the KrimsonKnight.6523 said:

I see this problem a lot in the GW2 community. People want to binge all of the new content in the first two weeks to a month and then spend the next year til the next LWS/Expansion complaining how there is nothing to do and the game is dead.

Just take your time with stuff and enjoy it. I think Anet gave it a good try, but by dividing the content people were going to binge in 2-4 weeks into quarters and then releasing it every three months still lead to the same problem.

Maybe they can try a monthly release schedule with the next expansion or something. But you can't really please everyone, so I think ya'll will still complain.

I didn't complain about nothing to do and the game being dead. If anything, I found it laughable whenever some of the players tried incorrectly proclaiming "maintenance mode".
I don't need them to make it into a monthly release (which just means we'd be getting even smaller parts of what we're currently getting) -and of course I'd complain about it, it just makes it into a worse state than the current release schedule. Wthout change I'd rather have them release a whole expansion, the less fragmented the release is, the better.
Which is also what I wrote in the post you've just quoted:

On 3/27/2024 at 3:29 PM, Sobx.1758 said:

I'd rather wait longer for an expansion and get it as a whole than get it cut into pieces and then partially delivered every few months like they do it with soto.

Proposing to "fragment it even more" (to release those parts monthly) just pushes it into the opposite direction of what I wanted to see -and it's not about binging the whole content either.

Edited April 1 by Sobx.1758