Guild Wars 2

[TVB]

Story and instances in this game suck ass, what is the purpose of this torture?

ANet cares more of balancing good gameplay with its shitty lefty political lecturing

 

[TVB]

Considering Secrets of the Obscure is the final DLC expansion for GW2 being the conclusion of the story, let me just say that the whole GW2 experience has been completely miserable.

 

[Back me up!]

GW2 started off great and was a nice breath of fresh air in 2012 compared to other MMO. I loved the evolution of the public quest system from the rough start from the Warhammer MMO along with the gear set pvp, exploration (jump puzzles), and the map stories.

But like everything else after 2016 the mindrot took over and only got worse and worse.

 

[TVB]

GW2 started off great and was a nice breath of fresh air in 2012 compared to other MMO. I loved the evolution of the public quest system from the rough start from the Warhammer MMO along with the gear set pvp, exploration (jump puzzles), and the map stories.

But like everything else after 2016 the mindrot took over and only got worse and worse.

This is exactly what happens when you have most mainstream media 2015 onward use BlackRock money to use their identity political sperging in stuff that aren't considered political.

 

[Scream Aim Fire]

Considering Secrets of the Obscure is the final DLC expansion for GW2 being the conclusion of the story, let me just say that the whole GW2 experience has been completely miserable.

Wait, is the last DLC out yet? Did you play it?

 

[Molag Bal]

Wait, is the last DLC out yet? Did you play it?

End of Dragons, the one before the current one, is technically the 'final' expansion as the entire game's story is concluded at that point, in a similar vein to FFXIV with Endwalker, except while endwalker was exceptionally good, eod was exceptionally bad. Originally they were going to make post-eod living-world esque chapters tacked onto eod, but in early 2023, they switched gears completely, dropped all post-eod hooks and ideas so hard it's like they're ashamed eod ever existed (they should be) and instead announced they'll be making annual mini-expansions with a three-month release schedule and a story that is about as far removed from postmodern cyberpunk korea as it can be. The release of their first dlc is still ongoing and last time I played, they actually were on-schedule.

I played through soto, the new one, and what of the mini-expansion has been released, minus maybe 1 patch worth of it, and it's a colossal step up from eod. Eod was a bunch of unimaginative fucks throwing a bunch of nostalgia bait at a wall. Nostalgiabait for shit that nobody is nostalgic for like aetherblades or scarlet, and then they try to round it out by turning the ministry of purity into yet another /pol/insert, like the creatively bankrupt speds they are.
They're still chasing fink's money, (why do people think some sheltered boomer kike cares about something like GW2 and has any chance of investing in it?), so of course the new characters are either gay, or they are Lyhr, a kangified dwarf. At least in the former case, their faggotry is relegated to optional lore stuff, they don't force you to sit there and listen to their social commentary fanfiction like in S3 for instance. But there is undeniably a difference, it actually feels like a fun campaign with the focus on the adventure, whereas comparably a lot of the previous story chapters including most of eod felt like some kind of social penance ritual deliberately designed to be painful. It's still a long way away from being good, but to claim there isn't a massive improvement would be lying as well.

Generally between the shift to their dlc model, dropping all the eod shit as hard as they did despite how up their own ass they were about it, it feels like some outside entity (NCSoft for instance) has been forcing them to clean house against their will. Specifically around development of the only 2 post-eod chapters that actually made it to release. That's when they started braking a range of retarded taboos that were treated as sacred for many years before.

 

[TVB]

Nostalgiabait for shit that nobody is nostalgic for like aetherblades or scarlet, and then they try to round it out by turning the ministry of purity into yet another /pol/insert, like the creatively bankrupt speds they are.

The same with most things these days. Corpos can still revive things from the dead that what we remembered, but instead of thinking about what made the original IPs good, they shoehorn in nostalgiabait and lefty politics.

 

[Back me up!]

@Apex Ralphamale How is the engine holding up? I'm tempted to get try the new expansion since its on sale and its only slightly pozzed compared to EOD.

 

[Molag Bal]

@Apex Ralphamale How is the engine holding up? I'm tempted to get try the new expansion since its on sale and its only slightly pozzed compared to EOD.

If your pc isn't new and performance is a concern, I wouldn't go for it.

In preparation for EoD they finally updated their engine, so everything from before then runs a lot smoother. Obviously anything with large amounts of people running their rotations on top of each other is still a lagfest. Moreso in newer zones.
For anything starting with EoD, the engine does worse than the previous one did with older content before the update. The most egregious case I can think of is Amnytas, where performance issues were so severe, that the social shame factor that's usually involved couldn't suppress it, everyone was complaining left and right about framerate drops. Basically they built this giant gold-plated marble city in the sky and completely removed the render distance, so you can see the entire thing whenever you're in the air. Except as a consequence, whenever you look across the map (as in look to the east while standing west, look north while standing south, etc etc) you still get noticeable framerate drops even on stronger machines.

 

[TVB]

Wait, is the last DLC out yet? Did you play it?

For me, I've given up 20 minutes in. Fuck ANet wholeheartedly

 

[Scream Aim Fire]

Right, so, haven't seen any talking about this game for a bit, which is understandable, but I was curious;

Is there... anything in the game that anyone here even enjoys these days? Like, the story is complete shit, and I'm not sure on the gameplay at this point; is there anything that anyone could really recommend about the game these days? The mount racing scene does sound interesting, tbh.

I was actually really considering hopping back into the game with a new character. That said, I've got no idea what to try and run now; my previous character was a Necromancer - good for PvE, and the Reaper spec is great for messing around in the PvP sector - but I don't really have an idea for a character or theme or anything to really go for this time around. Any of you guys got any suggestions, ideas?

 

[TVB]

Is there... anything in the game that anyone here even enjoys these days?

No. The GW2 ride had died by 2014 onward. Even the OG GW games from the 2000s are no longer safe due to nuplayers

 

[Herr Flick]

Right, so, haven't seen any talking about this game for a bit, which is understandable, but I was curious;

Is there... anything in the game that anyone here even enjoys these days? Like, the story is complete shit, and I'm not sure on the gameplay at this point; is there anything that anyone could really recommend about the game these days? The mount racing scene does sound interesting, tbh.

I was actually really considering hopping back into the game with a new character. That said, I've got no idea what to try and run now; my previous character was a Necromancer - good for PvE, and the Reaper spec is great for messing around in the PvP sector - but I don't really have an idea for a character or theme or anything to really go for this time around. Any of you guys got any suggestions, ideas?

For me, a lot of the entertainment value in GW2 comes from putting together builds that look fun and then playing them in various game modes. This has been the #1 motivator for me to unlock old Living Story maps and do various grinds--collecting the pieces of gear I need for an interesting build, or tweaking one I have that I already like. That said, I play GW2 pretty casually and in an on-and-off way, so there are often new builds to look at when I come back and I always enjoy it when I do. If you're interested in picking a class to complete and play with a brand new build, Lord Hizen and Vallun both put out decent build guides on the YouTubes (pve/open world and pvp respectively.) All classes are getting new weapons soon which should shake builds up as well.

The rest of the entertainment value comes from longterm grinds, like legendary weapons. I've only made one so far, but I'm working on a second for my warrior alt, and it's been a great excuse to dive into various meta grinds that take you all over the world (like Drizzlewood for gold.)

If grinds aren't your thing, the new map metas in SotO are pretty fun and the Wizards Vault feature is an excellent way to dabble in a few bits of content for rewards each day/week without feeling like you have to commit to a big wikipedia research rabbithole to find or pick up a complicated grind to spend your time on. Easily one of the best features added in years, and available to all players regardless of whether they own SotO if I remember right.

My mains are a scrapper engineer and a firebrand guardian, both using Celestial gear, and I can recommend them both for all modes except very high-end pve. When I don't feel like trying something novel, I'll usually jump on one of these guys and do my strikes, metas, etc.

 

[Elemental]

Man GW2, it was once a great game made by great devs who then proceeded to have their creation mangled by incompetent diversity hires and an almost malicious bad management. All the talent and people who made anet great have long since left the company and all that is left is a studio grasping at straws for how they can further mangle what was once a great game. I wish long running MMO's like GW2 got their own threads because the amount of drama, controversy and retardation that float around in these communities is enough to entertain people for years.

I'm going power level a bit, I use to be a large WvW guild commander who helped run server community for years up until HoT. For people who say this game died in 2014,2015,2016 you're incorrect people forget how cartoonishly incompetent anet was in the first years of this game. The only reason GW2 survived it's early years was because it had a good combat system, and the fact that there were no other options for MMO's to play, and when I say cartoonishly bad I mean it would make New World look like a stable release by comparison. Here's a SMALL list of all the stuff that went wrong in the first year alone.

1) Multiple dupe bugs on release
2) Banning players for buying items from a merchant
3) Demanding players banned for #2 to write an essay apology for cheating to get unbanned
4) Exploits found within the first months of the games existence that still have not been patched to this day.
5) A dev threatening to ban people for GvGing in WvW
6) The devs going full mask off on the forums and telling people they only want to hear positive feedback on a feedback thread...
7) The very first content release for first living world episode can be summed up as "Press F next to 15 signposts to get 20 AP, see you next month". I'll never forget the excitement and filled maps followed by the "are you serious?"
8 ) The story's final bossfight being a literal joke
9) Dungeons (the only endgame PvE content) sucked, who thought having invisible one shot land mines, enemies who's animations don't match their attacks, or they give no wind up for attacks, and having 3-5+ second stuns was a good design choice?
10) PvP launching with no ranked mode. Team ultrasweat could get matched up against total noobs multiple games in a row.
11) After promising no gear grinding as a core tenant to GW2 one of the first few updates the had introduced a gear grind (ascended gear).
12) Living world while a cool concept was very unpopular model due to it's FOMO where you had to play that week or forever miss the new content. Meaning you could quit in 2012, return 1 year later and there would be no new content for you to play.

I've probably missed several these are just the ones I remember of the top of my head.

And this is just the first year alone, I could double this list if I talked about the next year alone. Despite all of this of my 10k hours I'd say about 6k of them were prior to HoT's release, me and my guild ended up quitting WvW to go play ESO instead because the dev's fucked up WvW by adding in desert BL. I'll always have good memories of vanilla GW2 and some of my favorite are organizing multiple server guilds for twisted marionette, teq, triple trouble, battle for LA etc... but I'd argue LS3 - PoF - LS4 were the true golden years for GW2, even if they weren't the years that saw the most players. It was the only time in the history of GW2 where all modes of content were getting high quality releases everything from raids, to PvP, to fractals, to open world PvE, to WvW and the story for once didn't completely suck. This period had its problems and controversies but it was arguably the best time to be a GW2 player.

According to anet, more people are working at anet than ever before, yet despite that SotO struggles to produce 1/3rd as much content as LS3 (which was given away for free) in a larger timeframe then even LS3 got. I could go on and on about the issues of SotO or countless other drama thats happened over the years but if anet doesn't get their act together they aren't going to have a studio much longer, according to NCSoft's earnings report SotO did not sell well. So they better pray the next expansion does better.

 

[ShitLurker]

According to anet, more people are working at anet than ever before, yet despite that SotO struggles to produce 1/3rd as much content as LS3 (which was given away for free) in a larger timeframe then even LS3 got.

That's pretty much every single triple A project, and not just gaming, pretty much most software develepmont in any form has this issue today (hell, cinema and shows are plagued by this as well). More people than ever with shittier ouput than ever.

The Palworld reaction also shows that all these mouthbreathers are incapable of retrospection.

 

[Scream Aim Fire]

@Herr Flick: I'm similar in my enjoyment of the game; casual, on-and-off-again kind of player. I'll take a look at the two YouTubers you mentioned; might help me find some ideas on what to run. Also, good suggestion on Legendary weapon grinding; didn't actually do much of that beforehand, so I might give it a shot this time around.

Engineer and Guardian, huh? Should really try those out; I gave Guardian a small try previously, but I didn't do too much with it then, so I'll give it another shot. Also, I had a few ideas for some classes to run; what do you think of Elementalist, or Warrior, or Mesmer, or even Thief?

@Elemental: I feel the same way about this game; didn't join until around the middle of Heart of Thorns, I think, but I still grew to enjoy the game overall, and it's a damn shame seeing this game get destroyed by these wokeshit devs. Especially in comparison to the original Guild Wars; it's like ANet's team went out of the way to spit in the face of their own players in favor of faggots. Talk about casting pearls before swine...

Especially since the game has improved a bit since release; I can't help but wonder what the game could have been like if the woketards didn't ruin it.

 

[Molag Bal]

Dungeons (the only endgame PvE content) sucked, who thought having invisible one shot land mines, enemies who's animations don't match their attacks, or they give no wind up for attacks, and having 3-5+ second stuns was a good design choice?

That one was always a glaring issue but so many are too scared of coming across as bad at the game to admit the design in many respects was just shitty.
>maulers in hotw with that attack where they slowly and calmly swim forward while holding their spear up, but it's actually a GIANT MURDEROUS KILLERTORNADO OF DEATH, the animation is just completely mismatched
>the mines oneshot you, but if you keep running as you pass over them they detonate after you're already gone, oneshotting not you but the next person after you, even if they themselves didn't step on the mine itself (because the explosion radius is larger than the mine), basically punishing groups for running through together
>AC and TA p1 where every mob pack has several mobs with 3-5 second stuns, in TA's case with no cast time, windup or telegraph whatsoever, it's a shout-tier instant cast
>the bomb puzzle in CoF p2 that STILL bugs out the entire dungeon today
>the trap gaunlet in cof p3 where the traps count as enemies and put you in combat, slowing you down if your mobility happens to also deal damage
>the spider golem room in Arah where you have to keep charging the golem, where anet reacted to people skipping it by making the mechanic even harder, effectively forcing you to skip it for lack of being able to do it normally
Most of the issues could have been fixed by simply locking each room until you cleared the previous room's mobs.

 

[TVB]

didn't join until around the middle of Heart of Thorns, I think, but I still grew to enjoy the game overall, and it's a damn shame seeing this game get destroyed by these wokeshit devs. Especially in comparison to the original Guild Wars; it's like ANet's team went out of the way to spit in the face of their own players in favor of faggots. Talk about casting pearls before swine...

Personally, I joined back in 2013 and played it for a year and a half, and I did play the first few GW games a few years prior. I came back and found out how ANet really raised their middle fingers to long-time players for absolute leftist shit

 

[Elemental]

Personally, I joined back in 2013 and played it for a year and a half, and I did play the first few GW games a few years prior. I came back and found out how ANet really raised their middle fingers to long-time players for absolute leftist shit

Honestly it's not even the leftist shit that bothers me (much) anymore the story has been a joke ever since core and everytime I start to care about the story I get punished for it. The shit that really bothers me is the absolute spite or casual apathy anet feels for their playerbase. A few examples:

Prior to HoT's release anet decided to give a middle finger to the dungeon speedrunning community and heavily nerfed dungeon rewards so it could no longer be effectively farmed in order to try and force players to do their new raid content (which can only be run once a week, and has worse rewards per hour than just auto attacking open world meta events).

Prior to EoD's release they did it again this time with fractal CM's removing mystic coins from the drop chest, for those that don't know mystic coins are a heavily timegated material essential for legendary crafting, this was one of the few ways to acquire them back then. Playerbase accused them of nerfing fractal rewards in order to force players to play the new strikes which anet had mentioned will be getting mystic coins as well and they are just repeating the dungeon reward nerf from 6 years ago. Anet denies this, then later a massive leak happens regarding the secret balance discord which confirms what the playerbase had thought was happening.

Speaking of fractals, prior to the reward nerf anet decided to put an axe to the speedrunning community by removing the ability to use consumable items in fractals (they were mainly used for bar breaking CC damage) and additionally implemented a change so that when entering a fight all buffs are stripped, previously speedrunners would keybind 2 sets of gear/traits one which is their DPS build, the other which is a 100% boon duration build they used to stack 30 seconds of quick/alac/might, then swap to DPS in order to kill the boss quickly without having to be stuck in support DPS jail. These 2 changes were targetted at the 0.1% of the playerbase who enjoyed them the rest of the playerbase was totally unaffected by these existing. However as a result of the 2nd change, many bosses are now bugged and can HEAVILY punish players if you accidently activate a utility or boon too early it will be stripped from you a second later resulting in boon downtime or lower DPS.

During late LS4 anet had the brilliant idea to release a new WvW mount to players called the Warclaw, however in a typical anet fashion all WvW players are very familiar with, it was released with 0 testing onto the live servers for normal players to find all the bugs. If you told me the warclaw was developed by Bethesda I would honestly believe you. Here's a list of every bug this mount launched with along with how many months it took to fix these bugs.

• Warclaw didn't fit through doors this took a month to fix.
• There is a still existing active exploit when dismounting that lets you jump over gates and walls. (UNPATCHED)
• It launched without spear dismount. This means if a player jumped on warclaw at any point you were SOL. This literally killed roaming. It took 7 MONTHS for spear dismount to be added in.
• Warclaw launched with the highest HP of any mount, and with the ability to dodge twice, and its immune to all CC this means you have to burn all of your utility and CD's just to dismount the person (and then have them kill you) or they dodge your 30 second cooldown spear dismount because it is extremely obvious and easy to dodge, this made roaming miserable in combo with the next point. 9 months to patch
• Warclaw also launched with the ability to run MUCH faster when in allied territory this means player responses to an objective getting contested were much faster so people could see swords on a camp and get there much faster than you could finish capping it, made even worse by the lack of a spear dismount in allied territory warclaw use to run at 539 units, by comparison in combat runs at 210 units (400 with superspeed). 9 months to patch
• Stealthing while mounted caused permanent desync for enemy team. This took a month to fix.
• Using the maul engage skill did not put the player in combat, meaning they could use it to instant finish a player, then instantly jump back on the mount 3 months to fix this. Anet then changed it so anytime you dismount or use maul it goes into cooldown. This introduced a new bug where if you trip over a rock, walk on a hill, or any uneven land and your skill 1 breaks and you can't dismount (UNPATCHED)
• The shared speedbuff for warclaw is extremely erratic in its application. Very often you can walk next to someone but it won't give them the speedbuff (UNPATCHED)
• Hilariously, the default mount skin lacks a low quality model when first loading in, gemstore warclaw skins do however. This means when your game starts lagging due to player zergs or a battle if you attempt to jump on your warclaw with a default skin your client can get confused and thinks you are dragging behind across the ground while stuck in place. (UNPATCHED)
• Warclaw is the only mount in the game that is affected by boons this means with 25 stacks of might you can deliver 10k-20k AoE's in PvE. The second best mount (not counting turtle) only does <5k. (UNPATCHED)
• Warclaw launched with the ability to instantly finish enemies with its skill 1 allowed it to finish 3 people at once, thus the meta strat became having 1 person sit on a warclaw and instantly finish players, this also resulted in people following enemy zergs around and stealing their kills by warclaw diving onto the fight then running away to do it again. 13 months later this was changed from 3 instant finishes to 1 before anet decided "fuck it" and changed it to do 20% extra damage to downed much to the disappointment of many. 3 was far too many, but 1 instant finished was balanced especially given the sheer "fuck you" amount of instant revive skills any competent group will run.

If you've ever wondered why WvW players absolutely hate anet and are so negative about WvW updates this is why. Every WvW update since HoT has launched with this many bugs, most of which go unpatched, the rest anet rolls a 20 sided dice to decide how many months till they patch them.

Sorry for the schizo rant, I was running a WvW guild during this shitfest and these bugs are carved into me like PTSD. It sure is a shame we don't have a WvW map we could use to test features (FUCKING EOTM).

 

[Dante Alighieri]

Mounts were a mistake.