Guild Wars – The Mid to Not-So-Mid Levels

From scrub…

…to not giving a fuck about giving a fuck.

Guild Wars 

The last time I wrote about Guild Wars 2, I focused on my first impressions of the game from levels 1 to 10. As of this writing, my plant-elf is level 63 and climbing. I’ve played the game through two major content patches and have done a few instances. I’ve broken down and bought stuff from the in-game store and I’ve actually spammed partychat with my class build and stat rambling. Now that I’ve gotten a further idea of the game, my overall impressions haven’t changed – it’s a good game and a great MMO.

Continuing to Learn2Play

Instead of a boat that’s a house…a house made out of boats. Goddamn pirates.

My biggest complaint with Guild Wars 2 is that the game is hard to learn and it doesn’t NEED to be. It’s not massively simplified as some MMOs I’ve played fall into being (WoW, DCUO, Rift) and I think that’s great. I want some depth to my gameplay, I want my game style to be more than the age-old WoW rogue press 2, 2, 2, 3, 4 in sequence until the boss explodes in loot (none of which is ever for me).

GW2 does a good job of adding more elements to break this tedium: active dodging, dynamic abilities, weapon swapping in combat, etc. However, the game never actually teaches you how DO most of this. Your first level gives you a very basic tutorial in movement and dodging and then sends you off into the world without an explanation of why each ability slot has four abilities stacked on it or what the hell a combo is and how you pull them off – a feat I still haven’t figured out after over 100 hours of play. There’s a great wiki but I shouldn’t have to rely on a wiki to teach me important aspects of gameplay; the game itself should be doing that. Guild Wars 2 is not an intuitive game; expect to spend some time looking up information on everything from the way abilities work to gear sets.

Playstyle, Stats and Builds

The above being said – I adore building characters in GW2. As I mentioned in my previous article, your actual play abilities are determined by which weapons you have equipped; each class can equip specific weapons from available types. These abilities can wildly or minutely determine your actual playstyle; my thief can shoot stinky centaur at range with her dual pistols or backstab Communist dredge (they live in Molesk, Moleberia and Molengrad!) in melee with daggers. As an additional layer, you’re able and encouraged to swap weapons mid-combat, letting me easily go from range to melee or change melee styles from backstab to frontstab by swapping mainhands.

One of the prevailing themes of Guild Wars 2 is “the trinity is dead,” referencing the lack of dedicated tank, healer and DPS roles. It’s also incredibly fun to say. With so much of your survival in your own hands and different ways to approach one’s class, planning a build is anything from cookie-cutter. Each of the four prime stats (Power, Precision, Toughness, Vitality) have their own trees, points in which increase that stat, its corresponding

The Black Citadel? I think you mean ‘The Death Star,’ dude.

secondary attribute (Boon (buff) Duration, Condition (DoT) Damage, Condition Duration, Critical Damage and Healing Power) and give you important bonuses. Each class (“profession”) has an unique fifth stat that improves class-specific powers, like a thief’s stealth or an engineer’s toolkit. You can put up to 30 points in each tree, leading to a great deal of possible variation. As with most things, there will always be better builds than others, but there’s a wide variety of builds that won’t get elitist jerks glowering down their noses at you.

20 Levels To Go

I’m not playing Guild Wars 2 at the breakneck pace I have in other MMOs; for World of Warcraft expansions I’ve been known to play for as long as possible, get two hours or less of sleep, go to work and come home to do the same thing until I’m level capped. While treating myself like a prisoner being tortured by sleep-deprivation was FUN, the lack of subscription and dynamic instancing in GW2 doesn’t make me feel like I’m missing nearly so much when I’m not playing.

However, leveling is leveling. While I still like the way GW2 handles questing hubs a lot and the game still rewards my meandering (even more so in certain areas where there are huge jumping puzzles to waste hours on), the process of ‘find area, kill stuff, click on interactive item, gather and turn in other item, get XP’ gets repetitive. To be fair, this isn’t just Guild Wars; this is pretty much every MMO I can think of, GW’s offering is just a little more palatable. This problem is a hard one to solve – how do you get people to gain XP in a level- based system, make it solo-able and make it fun? Grinding of a lot of different types has been a mainstay in MMOs and  single-player RPGs for a long time.

Mixed in with questing is a long series of quests that do have a good deal of diverse points called ‘My Story.’ This story is the single-player plot of your character, following you throughout your leveling process. This is actually a lot of fun; stories depend on your race and background choices when you create your character so you aren’t playing the exact story each time. Quests take place in an instanced version of areas of the world and you can group with other players when certain tasks get rough.

Not EZ-Mode

And they will get rough. In fact, a lot of things in Guild Wars 2 are actively difficult. People die and they die a lot. Me, somewhat more than most since I’m playing the squishiest class there is (apparently ‘medium armor’ is

A lovely world in which everything will kill you. Twice.

pretty much just 4-ply instead of 2-ply, Arenanet?). Most questing hubs don’t present an overwhelming challenge, but skill challenges (where you can earn additional skill points to the ones you get from leveling up) are occasionally two person jobs (or one very good kiter – this game teaches kiting better than anything else) and sometimes there are group meta-events that can take 10 or more people to defeat and even then will have a slew of repeat fatalities.

Dungeons, though, are the hardest challenge presented unless you’re abysmal at jumping puzzles and good at not going into instances. Like any other zone, you’re down-leveled to the appropriate level upon stepping into an instance, but the only reason this makes a difference is that higher leveled gear is very helpful in not getting horribly mangled to death – but not by much. In one of my first instances, I died six times in ONE PHASE of a boss fight. I was imagining getting kicked out of my guild and being told what an atrocious baddie I was after that experience, only to have my frantic apologies greeted with “Oh, that happens to everybody,” from the same guildmates who had to revive my leaf-covered ass over and over.

Dungeons live up to their name as places of pain in GW2. AND THAT IS AWESOME. Dungeons are tough, yeah, and there is definitely at least a fight or two that could use some tuning down in difficulty. But the fact that it requires actual motion awareness, smart ability/skill choices and good response times makes dungeons really fun and super engaging. You can’t  make a bubble and alt-tab in GW2; you can’t let the rest of your party carry you to victory. In my opinion, this makes for way more fun than standing around beating trash mobs to a pulp while you wait for the boss to show up or constant tank and spanks.

Striving for Content

Arenanet is throwing a ton of effort into GW2 and it really shows. Since I’ve started playing there’s been two major content patches in two months with a third most likely on the way for  December. The first even I got to experience was the Shadow of the Mad King, a Halloween event and the second was Lost Shores, which involved the opening of a new high level zone.

Only the top half of true evil.

The Halloween event was incredibly fun and really well done. It was unrolled in stages and eventually opened a new temporary zone, the Mad King’s Realm. The realm leveled everyone up to 80, which was great because even as a lowly 30-something I got to go through the PvE labyrinth with a level capped friend. There were also a few fun new PVP games and the most evil timed jumping puzzle I have ever experienced. Outside of the new zone there was a chain quest that shared the event’s lore (which was actually well written, what the hell, MMO?) and random encounters all over the world. The Halloween event was fantastic and I hope the ‘Wintersday’ is just as fun (despite its lame name).

Lost Shores, on the other hand, while sometimes fun, wasn’t as well implemented as it could have been, something I attribute to the learning curve any MMO is going to go through. The event dealt with never before seen creatures busting out of the main city’s harbor, Koolaid-Man style, and going on a rampage. Unfortunately the creatures, the karka, mostly looked like overgrown crabs, which while delicious, were less than threatening. In actual gameplay they were boring, with very few interesting abilities and most just lots of shell armor to bust through. The finale was a two or so hour outdoor PvE event with multiple stages that all pretty much boiled down to shoot the giant enemy crab for massive damage. The combat was repetitive and the stages were nearly identical, though the earlier stages were quite brutal; there wasn’t much finesse to the brutality though, just AoE attacks that one-shot squishy little plant-lady thieves who just want to be one of the grown ups and play end-game style content! Ahem.

Though the Lost Shores event was less than optimal, it released a new challenge dungeon that I’ve extremely good reviews for and a new way for people to get loot by turning their surplus gear and mats into tokens.

The dedication to putting out new content that Anet is showing is pretty heartening. Unlike other games that let their playerbase languish for a year with no new content while they scramble to churn out yet another expansion instead of improving their graphics or end game content offerings (I will never stop being bitter, WoW), Anet is showing some actual good faith in trying to keep the playerbase entertained.

Overall

GW2 doesn’t have a lot of flaws, but the flaws it has can be hard to get over if you don’t want to sink effort into playing the game – the best information is found outside of the game, dungeon content could be hard enough to be discouraging  etc.

A pretty facade to hide an instance filled with KILL YOU IN THE FACE.

If you do want to put some extra credit work in, the game is really fun from a PvE perspective – it’s honestly more fun than I thought it would be at these mid-levels. Arenanet works to make sure that non-level capped players can be included into events and instances; GW2 goes to efforts to make sure you can play with your friends, even if your friends are on other servers or are twenty to thirty levels lower than you.

It’s a game I highly recommend and not necessarily as a time-sink or replacement for other games as a lot of MMOs can end up being. It’s a fun game to play for a couple of hours, forget about for a few days and then come back and pick right back up. It’s also a fun game to play for six hours a day, every day, and slam instances and PvP to your heart’s content. It’s got a little something for almost everything, if you can stick with it long enough to figure out what you like and how, exactly, to do it….now put some more pretty roleplay clothes in the store, Arenanet, I want to give you my money.