Guild Wars 2: Pre-Release Discussion

[bluefan]

I've never had problems hitting the right level to keep on doing my personal story. Participating in every event that happens, xp from kills, exploring, doing puzzles etc... Never have to grind.

[Alderaan]

I'm not a fan of the karma nerf. I used to have plenty and could always deck myself up in greens, but now i run out so fast. I guess it was too easy before.

[Cleverness]

Having to pay for gathering tools isn't dumb, anyone whose played an MMO like WoW where you just have the pickaxe of infinite durability and just the skill requirement knows how much easy money it gave if you sold them. Gathering in GW2 gives xp too, so to keep it balanced, if you want to be a gatherer, you have to pay a cost for it so it's not drastically much more money than if you were doing DE or PvP. EvE Online does the same thing. You want to gather efficiently? Ok, you need a mining barge, some mining lasers, and you can gather more than if a combat ship tried it. Otherwise it's inefficient and not worth doing and you'd be better off killing rats or PvPing in lowsec/zerosec.

Having different options to accomplish the same goal is far from dumb, it's called giving people who wish to do only 1 aspect of the game a way to not fall behind in levels while they do it.

[vrumpt]

I'm not a fan of the karma nerf. I used to have plenty and could always deck myself up in greens, but now i run out so fast. I guess it was too easy before.

Yeah neither am I. Might be that they went too far with the nerf, hopefully they'll revert it a little bit.

[Meresgi]

What is up with the respawns? Some areas mobs dont respawn that often..and in other spots they respawn in seconds. I've been killed 6 times in a bandit area at lvl 13 because after killing a single mob, 2 respawn behind me within 5 seconds

[Cleverness]

Respawns suck, that was an issue I had in the 2nd BWE trying to lowman things(tried to duo the supply camps in WvWvW but had an issue if we cleared the corpse of loot of the NPC defenders respawning too quick)

[fantasticdan]

I haven't been paying much attention to this game, but what is the pve 'endgame' like? Does it have dungeons or raids? The only thing I ever hear about are the open world "dynamic events", but I can't imagine those will be very interesting/challenging, as they have to be designed with the lowest common denominator in mind.

[Kuishen]

I haven't been paying much attention to this game, but what is the pve 'endgame' like? Does it have dungeons or raids? The only thing I ever hear about are the open world "dynamic events", but I can't imagine those will be very interesting/challenging, as they have to be designed with the lowest common denominator in mind.

Oh god...

[Cleverness]

There are still dungeons for endgame, they also talked about Orr which is just a gigantic Dynamic Event as another endgame area. They equated the first part of it to storming the beaches of Normandy, where you'll have to work with everyone to take it back and then it's just a struggle to try and do things in there. So fights there will range in terms of style from possibly fighting a giant effigy or something to having to combat a giant horde of enemy. They pretty much said they don't want endgame to be radically different from your leveling experience, if you do dungeons, PvP, and DE while leveling the endgame should fit those same criteria rather than something you never did until max level.

[Zzsark]

To chime in on the gathering tools debate. As far as I can tell the reason they have a slot for them and you aren't just able to gather w/e w/o anything is because they're are 'special' gathering tools you can get which increase your rate of finding rare materials.

Edit:
However, in one of the CBTs I was in you didn't need anything to gather from nodes and Karma vendors sold the special gathering tools that would up your chance at rare materials. Pretty sure those were unlimited use but I can't remember. Personally I wish they would go back to that design but I think what we have is here to stay.

[fantasticdan]

@cleverness

What is your impression of the dungeons? Are they fun/challenging? Are they all 5-man?

And is any of the open world stuff party limited?

[Rhyis.]

Well considering that I NEED to level up to do my story missions or to move to new zones and do the stuff there...yeah I would say I should look at my exp bar lol. Exploring is fine, but when shit can 3 shot you, exploring in that area usually isnt beneficial.

The personal story isn't going anywhere. Just sit back and do some other shit... And it's a beta. Why wouldn't you run into zones you shouldn't be in? Your character isn't going to exist in a couple days. The progression you do this weekend is meaningless. I'm 16 but I'm currently walking around 25-35 zones just to check them out lol

[Arelian]

@cleverness

What is your impression of the dungeons? Are they fun/challenging? Are they all 5-man?

And is any of the open world stuff party limited?

Dungeons are incredibly fun and challenging, but as I said earlier, you are not doing them to increase your numbers. Progression in GW2 PvE is based solely around wanting to look cool and obtain a neat looking armor set. All the dungeons are 5 man. None of the open world stuff is party limited, anyone who walks by can join in and get rewards.

[niwaar]

To chime in on the gathering tools debate. As far as I can tell the reason they have a slot for them and you aren't just able to gather w/e w/o anything is because they're are 'special' gathering tools you can get which increase your rate of finding rare materials.

Edit:
However, in one of the CBTs I was in you didn't need anything to gather from nodes and Karma vendors sold the special gathering tools that would up your chance at rare materials. Pretty sure those were unlimited use but I can't remember. Personally I wish they would go back to that design but I think what we have is here to stay.

They seem to not be just for "rare" anymore. They seem to be more akin to "gathering skill tiers". If you see an Iron Node, you better have the Iron Pickaxe to gather from it. Otherwise you get stuff called "ruined ore chunks" which are grey/junk items. Mind you, you can also find rare stuff like gemstones as well from something you do not have the correct tools from. Personally, I like the level requirements on these gathering tools. It should do at least a little something to deter the inevitable botting. (Not much of a determent but it will do something.)

[Zzsark]

They seem to not be just for "rare" anymore. They seem to be more akin to "gathering skill tiers". If you see an Iron Node, you better have the Iron Pickaxe to gather from it. Otherwise you get stuff called "ruined ore chunks" which are grey/junk items. Mind you, you can also find rare stuff like gemstones as well from something you do not have the correct tools from. Personally, I like the level requirements on these gathering tools. It should do at least a little something to deter the inevitable botting. (Not much of a determent but it will do something.)

I'm not talking about the iron/steel ones that karma vendors sell (which the regular merchants sell as well) see below:

[fantasticdan]

Dungeons are incredibly fun and challenging, but as I said earlier, you are not doing them to increase your numbers. Progression in GW2 PvE is based solely around wanting to look cool and obtain a neat looking armor set. All the dungeons are 5 man. None of the open world stuff is party limited, anyone who walks by can join in and get rewards.

I understand that GW2 isn't gear or progression based (which I think is great), I'm just curious how difficult the content actually is. For the dungeons, are they tuned to the point that you can expect to wipe if people aren't adhering to fight specific mechanics well enough or quickly enough? Or can you generally just slog through everything if 2-3 members of your group sort of know what they're doing, like a WoW 5-man?

[Arelian]

From what I experienced in BWE2, the entire group has to be on-point or else nothing is getting done.

[Meresgi]

So why do human faces look so bland? I look at my female human warrior in her armor, and the armor looks pretty good, nice and textured, reflective in parts, lighting is good. The environment around me is amazing, all very great...then I look at her face and hair and it just looks very vanilla WoW-ish.

[Arelian]

I've, uh, not really noticed that to be perfectly honest. The character models all look pretty good to me, far beyond anything WoW was even remotely capable of during vanilla. It might be your settings?

[bluefan]

I understand that GW2 isn't gear or progression based (which I think is great), I'm just curious how difficult the content actually is. For the dungeons, are they tuned to the point that you can expect to wipe if people aren't adhering to fight specific mechanics well enough or quickly enough? Or can you generally just slog through everything if 2-3 members of your group sort of know what they're doing, like a WoW 5-man?

Well, they're all level capped, so you can't have your higher level friends run you through it like a locomotive train.

The first mode, story mode, is from we've seen and have been told, is relatively straight forward. Still a bit more challenging than other MMO normal dungeons however. The explorable mode is the harder, more rewarding mode. Each dungeon has several paths you can take in explorable. Recent blog mentioned just how many there were. And it's much more difficult. On one of the press media days a few developers played through the explorable mode with a couple of press people and it still took them awhile to get through it.