So not long after posting here that I would not be playing GW2 until they added a dungeon finder I find myself playing it. I bought it simply because a friend bought it and I wanted to join him. In this case friendship is more important to me than principle.
So what do I think?
It's a great game to start off with. All the recent games of this style have had fantastic initial experiences - Rift, SWTOR and so on plus GW2 are miles more interesting and engaging than games we played 10 or 20 years ago.
Whether it will have tenacity is open to question. I do really feel that a lack of a LFD tool hurts it. Having played I can see that moving to the dungeon is a non-issue, they have teleporters at them. We'll see.
The WvWvW currently seems broken but I'm sure that will improve when they stop allowing migration to the winning servers.
PvP I haven't tried yet but I'm sure it will be really well done. It was superb in GW1.
The game is very alt friendly with interesting and complex build trees. For players like me who enjoy searching for powerful combinations there's a lot to wrap our heads around and theorycraft with. Plus the exploration driven maps are possibly more fun to alt on than quest driven maps are.
I suspect that the game will need to develop a stronger end game pve experience to really keep a good population though. I don't think farming noobs in battlegrounds is a sustainable end game and it also doesn't seem like there's enough PvE content to accommodate a genuine pve end game.
For all that there's certainly enough to occupy me for months and I'll have this game on my desktop for years. I've been having a blast so far with my Warrior and am looking forward to leveling all of the character classes eventually.
mmmmmm.... well, dungeons are a non-issue the first 30 levels. The first one, AC, open the story mode at level 30 and the explorer mode at level 35. The the other dungeons open at level 40, 50, 60, 70, 80. There are two level 80 dungeons, but only one each for level 30, 40, 50, 60 and 70.
ReplyDeleteDungeons at GW2 are for the story (how the Destiny's Edge group reforms) and for farm the dungeon coins (dengeon armor, legendary weapons). Not for advance level.
With relation to end game, there is Orr, that are 3 zones with no hearts that go from level 75 to 80 (one zone is only level 80). Level 80 players normally stay at Orr farming events and nodes. My level 80 toon share its time farming events at Orr or at wvw or farming dungeons for coins for the legendary.
Thanks for the explanation. I'm even more glad I didn't rush to 80 after reading your comment.
DeleteOrr offers one "endgame" option, but it's not the only one - to be honest, I really don't enjoy the place. It's great for farming cash and valuable crafting materials, but it's an unpleasant zone jam-packed with high level aggro and very monotonous in terms of both landscape and mobs.
ReplyDeleteHowever, with my level 80 engineer I'm happy to continue exploring at a leisurely pace and go fight in WvW, both of which (along with levelling alts) fill my time quite nicely. Dungeons are far less integral to GW2 than they are to WoW or even Rift. I've done a few story modes and one of the exploration branches of Ascalonian Catacombs and will probably see others when there are guild runs that need me as a filler, but the dungeons aren't needed to "gear up" so there's no real pressure to do as many PUG runs as possible.
I'm among those that would also appreciate a dungeon finder. I know it's the bane for many players. The end-game issue for me, is that I'd like to maximize my time and standing around spamming for a group isn't very efficient. There's no global channel so you need to be in that zone spamming.
ReplyDeleteI feel this is exacerbated by the fact that I can't do WvW in it's place because of the damn queues. I don't have an hour or more to get into WvW when I have an hour to play. I've joined a static 5-man as an alternative but I'm finding that a bit restrictive as well because I can't really commit to playing the same exact day and time every week. Bummer because the instances are pretty good so far.