Test Result Negative: GW2

The Level-A-Guardian Project came to an end some time ago. The original intention as detailed here was to start a new character and take her to the cap under the new conditions imposed by the Feature Pack. Back then there was a lot of concern that the changes to Traits would make leveling slower, harder, less entertaining and I wanted to find out for myself if those concerns were justified.

They aren't. Yep, it's that simple. Having leveled nine characters to 80 under the old system I can honestly say I noticed no difference whatsoever leveling the tenth under the new, or not, at least, in how much fun I had doing it. Leveling in GW2 was straightforward, simple and fun before and it still is. As I observed in an earlier post, The Trait Unlock mechanic remains sadly underdeveloped and peripheral but on the other hand you don't need traits at all to level up. At worst it's a botched opportunity to make Trait-hunting something to look forward to but in no way does it constitute a roadblock to fun or progress.

By the time my Guardian hit the sixties the project was more or less off the rails anyway. The lure of World Bosses and WvW pulled her from the true path of leveling by Hearts and Map Completion. After a brief flurry of excitement in the forties, when she realized she could wear and wield Rares, good housekeeping took over and any that dropped went onto the Trading Post to feed what I presume must be the min-max market. Given that each level in GW2 takes about an hour at the outside and you can change your entire armor set every five levels it can only be obsessive number-crunchers who find it worthwhile spending that kind of money but I'm happy to be the one taking their silver.

So my Guardian dinged 80 decked out in a motley collection of level 55-60 green quality drops and karma-vendor trinkets, in which she'd had not the slightest difficulty progressing smoothly and enjoyably. At this point a genuine first-time character might run into a speed-bump trying to scrabble up Exotics. I don't think you'd earn enough Karma for a full set at the Temples just by leveling up the regular way. You might get enough Badges from 80 levels of WvW although the life of an uplevel in the Borderlands can be trying.

To test that I'd either need to buy a third account or run a spreadsheet and enter every single Karma award and Badge earned on the specific character I was leveling up and, while I'm not saying that doesn't tempt me, unless I can find an institution willing to accept it as the basis for a Master's thesis I don't think I'll bother right now. It was thoroughly enjoyable instead to take her up to the vendors in the Yak's Bend Citadel and kit her out with a full set of Berserker armor and some more tanky accessories courtesy of the thousands of badges already earned by the rest of her team. Or I could have gone the Temple route and used some of my five million karma...

As for the Traits, I'd drifted so far from the original plan I'd forgotten about them to the extent that I'd only eve gotten around to spending the first couple of points, a situation which wasn't corrected until this weekend, by which time she'd been eighty for a couple of weeks or more. I finally got around to visiting the Trainer, buying the three or four Traits I needed and putting her into some kind of "build" that I got off the forums. It cost me about three gold and thirty or so Skill Points.

You can easily make three gold in a couple of hours doing World Bosses and I had over 80 skill points banked from leveling up alone, so again the barrier presented by the Trait Revamp is trivial. Yes, if you wanted to open all your Traits by adventuring it would take you weeks and to buy them all would cost scores of gold and heaps of skill points, but why would you need to do that? Even if you're the sort of person who likes to swap builds you'll probably never use the huge majority of traits. Just buy the ones you need when you need them.

My curiosity is satisfied. Neither the Trait Revamp nor the Megaserver turned out to be as disruptive or deleterious to a good, casual romp as had been bruited. Of the two the Megaserver remains the more problematic but that, too, has settled down into a background hum, easy to ignore. I see people I recognize often now so the sorting seems to have become more consistent at least. They still aren't the same people I saw regularly before the change but I can live with that. At least we can get Teq done on a regular basis in pick-up maps now, which is nice.

One thing the Project has made certain: there will be more characters. Leveling up is the most fun GW2 has to offer. I was in Wayfarer Foothills yesterday and one of the many new players (a half price sale will do that) asked if it got boring leveling up new characters after the first. Map chat resounded with a volley of variations on the theme "Like hell it does!". As one veteran player put it "Why do you think we're all here in a starting zone?".

Next up, Charr engineer or Asuran Mesmer for me I think. Mrs Bhagpuss has been leveling a Sylvari Thief because cultural armor. I sold a stack of ectos yesterday when the price was sky high so I can afford another character slot.

Before all that, though, comes Living Story Season Two. After watching the video (those explosions come from inside the ships) and listening to the soundbites all I can say is I told you so and so did Taimi, only unlike her I never trusted those Zephyrites.

Traits And Megaservers Reconsidered : GW2

What with The Tourney, Boss Blitz and Bazaar of the Four Winds, the project to find out what leveling up feels like now we have Megaservers and a new trait system fell somewhat into abeyance these last couple of weeks. Before that, my Charr Guardian cruised through Ascalon in short order, completing Plains of Ashford, Diessa Plateau, Filed of Ruin and Blazeridge Steppes before finally topping out in the upper fifties while finishing one of my favorite maps, Iron Marches.

All of that wouldn't have given nearly enough experience so there were some side trips to The Shiverpeaks, where she completed Wayfarer Foothills, Snowden Peaks and Lornar's Pass. More experience trickled in from a few forays into the Borderlands and the odd jolly to visit a World Boss here and there, now and then. Currently she's level 66 and trudging through Fireheart Rise, which, while it has grown on me a lot over the years, still wouldn't make any list I might compile of Places In Tyria You Must See Before You Die.

The whole project has been very instructive. It certainly hasn't turned out as I imagined it might, let alone how I feared. It's not really possible for an experienced player of an MMO to put himself, emotionally, psychologically or pragmatically, in the position of someone who just installed the game for the first time that day but even taking that into account it seems that the hefty changes brought by The Feature Pack have made leveling in GW2 no harder, slower or more tedious than it ever was.

On my travels I have once or twice, no more than that, heard people express the opinion that they were feeling the lack of Traits at lower levels. It's certainly not a topic of conversation that comes up often among the endless rehashing of builds and torrent of "how do I...?" questions that buzz around the ever-busy open chat channels of the Megaserver Maps. At no point so far have I felt either underpowered or restricted in options because of the paucity of trait points. Indeed, it was only as I was writing this and popped into the game to check how many traits my Guardian had that I realized I haven't even spent the last two she received.

Part of the reasoning for doling out Traits so slowly was supposedly to prevent new players from becoming confused and overwhelmed by choice. Even as someone who has never considered Choice to be a Universal Good I was skeptical about that argument. I very much doubt there would have been many players under the original system who threw up their hands in despair when faced with half a dozen options in half a dozen trait lines. That sort of thing tends to go with the territory when you play any kind of RPG, doesn't it?

Just because the old system probably wasn't broken doesn't mean it couldn't be improved, though, and somewhat to my surprise I think the new version is better, at least in some ways. It certainly makes me think much more carefully about which trait to choose and pay much more attention to what they all do than I used to, that's for sure. When you have to decide whether to spend money or do a specific task to open each individual trait it definitely focuses the mind and I've found the experience a lot more entertaining than I expected, in no way the frustrating time or money sink that people (including me) had speculated it might be.

There may be "nice grawl" but there's no such thing as "nice Flame Legion"

It's not all rainbows and roses, though. There are definitely ways it could be and needs to be tightened up. The main drawback remains the rate that traits are unlocked during normal gameplay. It barely happens at all. ANet seem to be aware of this. A recent patch made a good few changes to the detail, reducing over-reliance on Map Completion as a mechanic and increasing the emphasis on killing specific monsters or completing specific events.

It's a start but it doesn't go nearly far enough. After 66 levels, done almost entirely by completing level-appropriate content in the open world, my Guardian has unlocked precisely six traits out of a possible sixty-five (and she bought one of those at the Trainer). I don't think that a system that results in a character having around 90% of her traits still locked when she hits max level can be considered well-tuned.

This is the one I bought. Essential.

The other goal of the exercise was to see how the world felt under the jackboot of the Megaserver. There was a lot of strong feeling about this change when it happened and I was among those who felt strongly. Like most changes it turned out to be less of everything than expected - less of a boon for those that welcomed it and less of a curse for those that dreaded it.

Maps are consistently busier as was intended but maps that don't have a specific, popular mega-event are only busier by comparison to the wastelands they used to be. You certainly won't be trampled by the horde in Iron Marches or Fireheart Rise. Field of Ruin, remarkably, felt even quieter than I remembered it. My concern that the ambiance of the deep wilderness would be lost seems unfounded.

Whatever algorithm they're using to match players with friends/guilds/worlds has arguably improved slightly but my feeling is that there's still some inconsistency baked in that no one quite understands. There was quite an argument in Map chat over it yesterday with some people claiming it worked well for them while others expressed what has been my own experience, that it's at best hit or miss. I generally still have to right-click Mrs Bhagpuss's portrait to get to the same Megaserver Map about fifty percent of the time even when we are grouped. Given that the algorithm isn't managing reliably or consistently to place us together even though we are in the same Guild, on each other's Friends lists, share the same Home World and Language Group and are in the same frickin' Party...well it's not impressing me much.

The Great Jungle Wurm is under there somewhere. And so's my Guardian.

The effect on community has been interesting. I do still see a good few familiar Yak's Bend names around outside WvW and it has an interesting emotional resonance, rather like spotting someone you know in the crowd at a gig. I wonder how much that relies on me having known those names already from the pre-Megaserver days. Would a new player starting now ever even see anyone, outside their guild or WvW, often enough to build up that "know him by sight" kind of relationship? I suspect they might because there are now players from other servers that I vaguely recognize because they turn up at World Bosses at the same times I do.

Unlike the Trait revamp, about which very little now seems to be said, you can still hear people complaining about the Megaserver every day. There's often someone bemoaning its very existence in map chat, cursing its foibles and flaws or wishing for the return of at least one non-Megaserver Map (the consensus would probably be for Lion's Arch). Voices also speak strongly in defense, praising both the convenience and the liveliness it brings to events big and small. I would have expected people to have gotten used to it by now but it seems that it'll take a while longer before we forget how things used to be when we were all off in our own little worlds.

Overall I'd give the Trait Revamp 7/10 and Megaservers 5/10. Neither is as bad an idea as it first might have appeared but both could do with another pass or several with that famous ArenaNet polishing cloth.

Return To Ascalon : GW2

The Guardian is overpowered. There's no two ways about it. When GW2 began I read several accounts by those who'd taken the class as first choice and I was struck by how easy they made their experiences sound. It wasn't as though I was having a hard time with the Ranger but it seemed Guardians were having a softer ride still.

Despite those reports, as I leveled all the classes Guardian was the one I was least looking forward to. It's a paladin of sorts and paladin is a class I've always found worthy but dull. I left it to the end and when I finally got around to it I coupled it with the race I least wanted to play, that Elf-substitute, the Sylvari. That way I'd get two bitter pills down in one swallow.

As I played one up I can't say I warmed much to the Sylvari as a race. I'm fond enough of my single Sylvari character but I don't think I'll ever make another. The Guardian class, though, turned out to be an unexpected pleasure and now, with added Charr, it's gone beyond a pleasure to a joy. There's no ambiguity over how I want to spend my gaming time at the moment.

This is a crucial week in the Season for Yak's Bend, a match we have to win to stay in contention for a top three placing. Bodies on the ground matter, even indifferently skilled ones, and most evenings I manage a few hours in the Borderlands with the only two classes I can play in WvW with any facility - Ranger and Elementalist.

Duty done, the rest of every day's Charr Guardian day. After Diessa we moved on to Snowden Drifts, filled that out, taking her to 25, perfectly poised for Lornar's Pass, which nominally covers 25 to 40. The final point of interest lit up just after she'd dinged 33, by which time she was surrounded by level 39 and 40 mobs.

In common with other MMOs GW2 has a few ways of reminding you that you're running ahead of yourself. The distance at which aggressive creatures begin to pay attention to you increases substantially once they have more than a five level advantage and there's a level-based sliding scale for glancing blows, which reduce your damage by half. Playing a  Guardian solo it was hard to feel engaged with combat unless the creatures we were fighting towered four or five levels above me.

Even that was well inside my comfort zone. The point at which the "challenge" approximates what I remember as normal leveling play in older MMOs like EQ2 or LotRO comes at a very specific point: six levels above your character level. That's when the unmodified chance of Glancing Blows hits 50% and its what I would consider the sweet spot for enjoyable fights that require tactics, concentration and engagement.

It also appears to be the very highest level-differential at which whoever decided on the rules wanted or expected players to operate. Once you cross that six level gap your "chance" of landing a glancing blow becomes a 100% certainty, which isn't much fun and which, I think, we can safely take as a message from the developers that you've pushed your luck too far.

At this point I should make it clear that I'm very much not one of those people who demand "challenge" in everything or who irrevocably links risk with reward. Nor do I necessarily feel MMOs have become too easy to be entertaining. I agree with Wilhelm when he observes that  "the strongest force in the universe is laziness" and I'm generally more than happy to take the low road.

It's not, after all, as if I'm comparing the experience to, say, Everquest, now supposedly a dumbed-down, weak-beer parody of its former self, yet where, in 2014, playing the best solo class in the game, fully dressed in good, level appropriate gear, near-raid-buffed from MGBs and with a mercenary NPC providing heals, I still have to pay full attention to what I'm doing at all times when fighting mobs several levels below me because not to do so would mean a swift death and twenty minutes recovery time. I'm not comparing GW2 with that. That would be silly.


I'm merely observing that it's perhaps an odd quirk of design that places what feels like a natural, comfortable, easy-but-satisfying level of gameplay right at the very upper margin of the range of the feasible. Or perhaps, as I began by suggesting, it's just that Guardians are overpowered.

You might argue that, since GW2 gameplay is built around a core of loose alliances and informal non-grouped group play, content was never designed for or aimed at soloists; that  although for something like 80% of the time the game's been around, most leveling-by-map-exploration has, by necessity, been a solo activity, it's nothing more than an unintended accident of circumstance and one that the Megaserver is here to correct.

You might argue that if it wasn't for the glaringly obvious fact that almost without exception content in GW2 gets easier the more people there are to do it. Oh, granted, it often takes longer. It's always been fastest and most efficient to complete most group events with a handful of people rather than a zerg or a blob. But unless you equate time taken with difficulty rather than just with inefficiency, more people never make things harder.

Then again, perhaps it's down to the post Feature Pack retuning of sub-80 content that was carried out in recompense for the loss of character-power inflicted by the Great Trait Revamp. It's hard to remember, being so long since I last leveled a character, but it does seem easier this time even without those traits.

 

Speaking of Traits, at 30 I was finally able to open the window to see what lay in store. I was curious to see if the same "wait and see" approach would leave higher Traits locked away from view but no, once you hit 30 you can see them all. Of course see them is all you can do. I had one Trait point at 30 and at 33 I still have one Trait point. I get another at 36 and the third at 42. Hard to imagine why anyone thought this could ever be a good idea.

Even though you don't have the points to use them, there's nothing to stop you unlocking the Traits themselves, of course. You can now mouse over to see what they are and where you earn them. For example, I can see that to get the Adept level Trait "Master of Consecrations", which "Reduces recharge on consecration skills and increases their durations", I would need Map Completion for Frostgorge Sound, a level 80 map. Or I could pay 10 silver and two skill points to a trainer, which, if I didn't already have the resources required, might take, oh, five minutes rough and tumble on a map my own level. Hmm. Tough one. What would you do?

Scanning down the list it seems to me that as each trait point is acquired almost everyone will immediately go to their trainer and purchase the one they want right now, because even if someone was flat broke it would almost always be quicker and easier to earn the silver and the skill points than to do the forfeit. Indeed, given that many of the unlocks require map completion, you'd have earned everything you needed to pay the fee almost as soon as you started, so why carry on?

Meanwhile, in the background, as players naturally play through content, odd, random Traits will unlock themselves here and there. I already have "Inner Fire" unlocked, for example, because the requirement for it is Map Completion for Lornar's Pass. In three levels I'll even have the second point I need to open the first Major Trait slot and use it.

In operation, as I anticipated, it's not at all a bad system. It's easy to understand and it gives the player choice in how to access it but it seems extremely unlikely to form any kind of framework for providing self-generated, self-directed gameplay. Not only is the Trainer option clearly faster, easier and cheap but the points accrue so very slowly that there's no incentive whatsoever to go out and open Traits in the first place.

Not a disaster, then, but certainly a missed opportunity. Something easily pushed to the background as one pursues the unchallenging but highly enjoyable task of incrementing that number in the bottom-left corner of the screen. My Guardian is now in Fields of Ruin, feeling very overpowered indeed against the level 30 mobs but glad to be back in the warm Ascalon sunshine after days spent shivering in the snow.

Mind you, being overpowered in level-appropriate content didn't help much on the run through 40-50 zone Blazeridge Steppes. Even though she did make it through with nothing worse than singed whiskers there were some very tense ten hit point moments along the way. Thank Dwaya for Renewed Focus, that's all I can say...

Now Ebonhawke, my second-favorite city in the game, awaits. We've already herded farm animals and torn down posters. We even found the famous Pipe Organ and attempted a tune. It's an adventurer's life for sure. Overpowered she may be, or the content undertuned, whichever it is, but there's entertainment yet to be had and plenty of it. If current parameters hold, Map Completion of Ascalon should come somewhere around level 65. For a Charr that's all the incentive required.

Ding 720! : GW2

What do people do when they hit the level cap in GW2? Wait! Don't tell me, don't tell me - I know this one!

I should do, at least. It's hardly a novelty. I have the full set now, all eight classes. The guardian crossed the finishing line this weekend, just behind the spare ranger, the two of them running neck and neck most of the way. That makes nine Level 80s so far.

It's at this point that I usually start to think about getting them into something more suitable than the random grab-bag of yellows and greens they leveled up in, some of which really should have been upgraded weeks ago. The first time at the cap, way back last autumn, the whole process took a couple of weeks - planning, scrimping, saving, hustling up Ectoplasm, hunting down bones. Arrangements were made, crafters enlisted, decisions worried over at inordinate length as though they really mattered.

Earlier this year it was still taking most of a weekend. Yesterday it took less than half an hour. Although the guardian's a 400-skill Armorsmith and the craft bank overflows with ectos, a quick glance at values and costs put paid to any idea he might have had of making his own Exotics. Not with 2000 Badges of Honor, mostly from the achievement backlog, taking up valuable inventory space, more than enough to pay for six pieces of Berserker's Chainmail from the Armor Master in Yak's Bend Citadel and a Berserker's Greatsword from the Weapon Master standing next to her. A few rings and accessories out of the guild bank, one or two odds and ends from the Trading Post - job done.

It'll go the same way for the new ranger later on today. Level cap to full exotics in minutes. Yes, there's Ascended gear for some slots, with crafted Ascended, which will presumably cover the rest, waiting in the wings. That's enough time-gating to keep someone busy for a good long while, but to what end? Is there anything at all in the game that requires Ascended gear other than as a container for Infusions, and do Infusions have any purpose other than to allow you to do the same content again only with bigger numbers?

No, for any foreseeable purpose, Exotics should be more than enough, Exploring, world events, crafting, Living Story, WvW, that's what my characters do while they level up and that's what they go on doing at the cap. ANet claimed it would work that way and by and large it does. Given the lock on expansions there's really no reason that situation can't persist indefinitely.

With no real gear progression after cap and no gear-locking of content provided by the game itself, it's somewhat amazing to see the wholehearted way players have created a treadmill for themselves. People throw themselves into the grind, willingly or not, just for new skins or items with a different look. The tiniest differences in stats - differences not upgrades - kick up lengthy arguments over which is essential, which useless. Whether there's any material difference in what people can or cannot do with any particular combination that doesn't primarily come down to player skill I beg to doubt, but if it keeps them happy...

Having all eight classes to choose from my preference is the same as it was from the very first beta weekend: Ranger. Widely reckoned to be the weakest, considered broken by those who don't play it and most in need of fixing by many who do, still there seem to be more rangers running around Tyria than any other two classes added together. Currently my go-to class for both open-world PvE and WvW, I understand I won't be getting many dungeon invites but hey, that's probably a bonus!

So, is that it, then? Two rangers, one each of all the rest. Are we done? Hmm... Stand up straight, you lot, asuras at the front. Where's the Charr Engineer? Well that's just not good enough, is it? We're going to need another character slot...

He’s good-bad, but he’s not evil : Rift

Is that it?

Ah, the Shangri-Las. My second favorite all-female band. Clearly the inspiration for Rift's odd choice of two sides, neither of which is really good and neither of which is really evil.

The Guardians are religious zealots. The Defiants are single-minded technocrats. I wouldn't trust either of them to run an orphanage. One thing I have noticed, though, is that Defiants get a distinctly easier time of things when it comes to events.

Events, dear boy, events. Harold MacMillan would have loved Telara. How fine to live in a world where events don't pop up unexpectedly to spoil your day. How much neater to know the day and hour ahead of time. Sweeter still to know that your event is easier than the other guy's.

Meridian is much easier to navigate than Sanctum. Well, it is outdoors, at least, and that's where most events take place. There's a big courtyard, a wall and a yard of scrubby grass.

More potash please

Sanctum, on the other hand, is a wheel circled by a winding path inside a retaining wall. A lot of sickly, stunted trees and rickety buildings cramp the space. Visibility is poor.

I have Guardian and Defiant characters. I even have one Guardian character who only does city events. She's never done anything else since the tutorial and she's gotten to level thirteen. I get to see all events from both sides. Each team gets the same quests for each event but I can always do the Defiant version faster than the Guardian. Sometimes it barely takes half the time.

My Guardian Hat

With my Guardian hat on I'm okay with that. We religious types are nothing if not long-suffering. The current event, however, goes beyond a little extra running between spawns. As I described before the quest in Meridian takes you just a few yards outside the gate and someone has even thoughtfully marked the path with lanterns. It took me about 10 seconds to find it.

The Guardian version is on the coast below the high bridge leading into Sanctum. I could see that on the map but I had no idea how to get there. As far as I knew, there was no way down there other than to jump off the bridge. I ran around a bit looking for another way down but I couldn't see one. So I jumped off the bridge.

Once I dragged myself, wet and shivering, out of the sea it was simple enough to complete the quest, but then I had to get back up. I was very surprised to find a path. With a neat wooden fence on the seaward side. Just to stop me falling in. Bit late for that.

Donkey rides sixpence!

Has this path always been there? I can't recall seeing it before and I spent an inordinate amount of time in Silverwood and Sanctum earlier in the year. Was it added for this event, like the lanterns in Freemarch or is it yet another example of the incredible depth of detail in the lands of Telara, where I really do still see something new every day?

Treant. It's such a tinny word.

I followed the path up. Eventually it wound back to the main road leading into Sanctum, but only after I'd dodged an aggressive level 14 treant taking a constitutional up and down the track.

Now I'm not claiming this was difficult. Compared to a trip from Ak'Anon to the Windmills or from Surefall Glade to Qeynos it was a walk in the park. But it did ask a lot more of me, and my character, than the Defiant version.

I like it. A lumpy playing field is good. Might be nice once in a while to let some moles lump up Meridian's scabby grass, though. Don't want the Guardians to have all the fun.