Doctor Overlord

I think people's memories of gw1 end game are becoming fictionalized.  The content was either...

1.  Faceroll with meta 7 hero builds and OP pve-only skills.

2.  Faceroll with meta 7 hero builds and OP pve-only skills but you had to pop essence of celerity.

3.  Extremely difficult unless you ran gimmick builds like terratank, shadow form that were designed specifically for that instance and had little application elsewhere in the game.

4.  Impossible without gimmick builds but extremely easy with them, and became the domain of speedrun guilds who competed for speed run records.

What DIDNT exist was...

5.  Nuanced instances that were best completed by parties of human players using balanced builds and not requiring consets that had interesting encounters.  The closest to this was FoW in the pre-Heroes days but even then the farmers already devised gimmick builds that were superior to general balanced team builds.

If people are arguing for a return to GW1 type content where you have to run gimmicks like 55 monks, terratanks, SFsins in order to complete the end game content, I'll pass.

Please, for all that is good, make the school girl uniform a light armor and not town clothes.

I`m I the only one that noticed school girl costume + tentacles COMBO ?

Doctor Overlord > no, the charr isn't made with vectors. But I could have done this indeed. That's a technic I'd like to test to.

You're smart, I wasn't ready to post it there, because I don't have enough episodes. But as you speak of it, here it is

I like the humor and the personality that the game really shows !
Looks fun indeed, will have to wait and see how it turns out to be.

It always astounds me how whenever MMO players admit to enjoying solo content, they get jumped on by people who think they don't have the right to play the same game they do, or that enjoying a game is a zero sum all-or-nothing proposition. I'm also of the opinion that people who think an MMO should be defined largely by dungeon or raid encounters are holding the genre back by chaining it to the mechanics and demographics of forty year old tabletop and miniature games.
Not to mention most of the people that hardcore into that side of the MMO experience are probably still playing WoW and providing a pale imitation of WoW's experience isn't the best strategy for GW2. Colin Johanson had said it himself several times.

In other words dungeon design and accessibility, like other areas in GW2, are symptomatic of larger problems.

By the way, I think soloing content with heroes was an awful experience. GW1 was never designed to be a squad based solo game so a lot of the "fun" of heroes was finding some way to compensate for the game's clunky and inefficient interface, pig-stupid AI and badly tuned encounters.

Gilles VI, on 08 April 2013 - 11:08 AM, said:

Most of the people I came across back in the day espoused builds using Earthshaker, Dragon Slash, and, yes, Warrior's Endurance based builds. 100b was situational (and really worked best when you had a necro along who could throw lots of MoP nukes). There were a few other builds around that weren't God-tier, but still situationally useful and suitable for doing something different.

Furthermore, it needs to be remembered that GW1 had, at the time GW2 was released, been out for seven and a half years, with few major shakeups to skill balance after EOTN released (and the warrior profession specifically was largely left alone apart from the 'replace unused elites with more useful ones' initiatives, compared to professions like mesmer and dervish that did get completely overhauled) - GW1 players literally had years to figure out what the most optimised builds are. GW2, by contrast, hasn't made a full year yet, and for most professions players are already broadly agreeing on what the best build is for a given profession, or at least the best handful of builds. I'd say there's a substantial difference between having figured out the best set of builds after a few years of occasionally disrupted stagnation and doing so while the game is still young.

APRIL'S FOOLS DAY CAME EARLY.

While I can see a lot of ways I'd like GW2 to improve, for me it is still the most enjoyable MMORPG currently available.

Reactions probably depend a lot on how inflated people allowed their expectations to get before launch.  I never expected GW2 to completely revolutionize the MMORPG.  I did expect it to rework several of the things that make other MMORPGs very annoying.

Some things that they have done well:

1) Various changes to make it friendlier to see other players out in the world, instead of worrying about them impinging on your play by doing things like stealing key mobs or taking gathering nodes.

2) More movement in combat.  The idea of casters standing still for the large majority of their abilities always seemed artificial and not fun.

3) Streamlined toolbars.  Good riddance to dozens of skills, the vast majority of which you rarely use because they are either inferior to other skills or highly situational.

4) DEs.  Yes, they are just dressed up quests, but I like the dressing.  I find it much more immersive than the standard, static quest.

5) Hard trinity tied to profession choice.  I wouldn't mind if they adjusted healing and cc to be a bigger part of the game, but I never want "healer classes" and "tank classes" back.

6) The world is beautiful.  Even Orr, the area players love to hate, has me stopping to look around in wonder as I explore it.

Things that I'm disappointed in:

1) They started off declaring that death penalties weren't fun.  Wish they'd stuck to this.

2) How easy the open world is.  By the time we get to 70-80 zones, it'd be nice if things were difficult enough that you were required to find at least a couple of other people to party with in order to go out into the zone.

3) Gear treadmill.  I like a hard power cap, because I always have the nagging feeling that I should be getting something done as until I've reached full BiS gear.  Once I've hit power cap, I happily wander through the game following my bliss, as it were.

4) Crafting is just stupid.  When mats are worth more than crafted items, crafting is obviously broken.  Sad that this are of the game has largely become a power-leveling method, and nothing more.

5) The personal story is interesting up until you get to the meta-plot.  The dragons are a terrible choice of antagonist, and Trahearne is one of the most annoyingly blah characters I've ever come across.

The most addictive game in years.

Not for everyone, not perfect, yet the only game of its genre I have found to be worthwhile in very long time.

Like every other MMO, it is filled with whiners.

Better than most.

My personal favorite MMO game to date, but understandably wont satisfy everyone, a game that will only continue to get better.

raspberry jam, on 18 March 2013 - 04:58 PM, said:

There are both techincal and design restrictions that cause MMOs to be crappier games in general, it's the necessary tradeoff for the game's social functionality. To give a couple very brief examples of such restrictions, technical: bleed cap, design: impermancence of player actions in the world.
The situation with MMOs is not a matter of "people accepting mediocrity", it's the realistic state of the industry.

And before you hit me with "ohbutGW1wassogreat", I found GW1 to be boring and bland, mediocre at best. It's no paradigm of greatness. It was a niche title, and 7 million sales with redundency since they count campaign sales seperately PLUS an Asian release, doesn't make it less of a niche.