I've read some negatives about GW2, particularly that one can't really play the role of "healer". That would be frustrating to me, as I enjoy that role moreso than being the attacker in MMOs. Is this true?
A person who played healer in another game would likely find the most enjoyment playing a support. A support would be similar to that of League of Legends where you are providing bonuses to your team (which include some minor healing) but are not continuously interacting with your allies' health bars.
I've read some negatives about GW2, particularly that one can't really play the role of "healer". That would be frustrating to me, as I enjoy that role moreso than being the attacker in MMOs. Is this true?
The dedicated role of "healer" has been deemphasized in GW2 to obviate the unwritten "holy trinity" rule that plagues other MMOs, i.e. "you must have a healer/tank/crowd control." This is one of the crowning achievements of the game, in my opinion, and a big reason why I chose Guild Wars 2. Players can heal themselves, but that's not the whole story by half.
ArenaNet's view of the "support" role is just different from what people are accustomed to. In their own words:
Don't belittle the SUPPORT role by calling it heal. Healing is the least dynamic kind of support there is. It is reactive instead of proactive. Healing is for when you are already losing. In Guild Wars 2 we prefer that you support your allies before they take a beating.
To that end, there is an extremely diverse set of gear and abilities that promote damage from ever occurring in the first place: shields, damage interception, projectile interception, offensive conditions (debuffs placed on targets to reduce their output), mass regeneration, condition assumption (absorbing debuffs from your party onto you). There's gear that extends the duration of the boons (GW2 lingo for buffs) you may place on players, there are slot skills (GW2 parlance for WoW's talents) that further enhance and extend the aforementioned abilities. There are even weapon configurations that players can carry to orient their entire character towards playing the support role.
All of these characteristics can be assumed by a single player playing, for example, a Guardian, the Paladin-style class that has a preposterously high degree of support abilities at its disposal--if the player itemizes and talents in that direction. And with this perspective, we can begin to see that the "healer" role was one born out of necessity. Combat systems in previous-gen MMOs were not equipped with the dynamism necessary to be support in any other way than "heal and buff", so everyone just played excel with damage in vs. damage out.
Further, the onus of avoiding damage has become and individual responsibility by equipping each player with many of these abilities. Each class in their offensive setups have limited abilities to negate damage, avoid damage, cleanse debuffs and so on. Players cannot just phone it in while the healing corps carries them to victory, so in a very real sense this is probably one of the most symbiotic MMOs ever made.
Auto-piloting the Holy Light button is indeed dead, and not a moment too soon.
While in the betas, certain aspects (particularly the storyline) were marked as "works in progress," and I convinced myself they'd be better with the full release. They're not, and that disappoints me, when it may not have if I hadn't been in early and seen that WIP tag. I may have just accepted that it was different instead of unwittingly expecting something more. This is my fault, not the GW2 teams' fault.
Another thing that is almost certainly my fault: I run into my same irks with the leveling system as I did during the betas. I think it's quite possible that I just don't play the game "correctly," but either way, it led to me playing for 3 or 4 hours on Saturday morning and then turning it off.
I'll probably come back to it at some point, but right now I'm just dejected, and it's only my own fault.
While I was not impressed with my character's storyline up to level 10 (mediocre writing), it has gotten much more interesting as seemingly trivial events have unraveled into a much larger conspiracy involving renegades, separatists, royalty, murder and more.
Thanks for your explanation. I'm really kinda curious how it is that you and some others play the game, because I still haven't experienced any of the "under level for content" issues. I just pew pew as I walk around, and make sure that my level is close to the number by the heart. :/ Sucks that it isn't meeting what you expected though.
I enjoy my Ranger storyline a lot. Of course I didn't play beta so it's all new to me. As far as healing goes, even my ranger can launch a health spring which heals in pulses for some time in an area. It also removes "Conditions" from allies. My only complaint so far is the pet is pretty wimpy and worthless so i have been using him as a follower, buffer, debuff remover. Kind of a light support tank. It works fairly good and since I have traps and knockbacks it usually works well unless i am overwhelmed by numbers. Gotta work on control skills I guess since the traps only slow and not hold so far.
I've read some negatives about GW2, particularly that one can't really play the role of "healer". That would be frustrating to me, as I enjoy that role moreso than being the attacker in MMOs. Is this true?
Prime I think you would really like the engineer class. Reminds me of TF2 engi. Has turrets, including a healing one. Maybe checkout some videos of their gameplay.
After four days and hitting level 18, soloing is quite boring. There is a lot of repeating in this game (gather this, kill them, defend that guy) I'm also finding only having 5 skills per weapon set boring. I never had this feeling in GW1. The "story" kept me going. I had 100's of skills to pick and choose to use on my 8 slot bar. Also I can't out-level an area if I just want to "casually" play, as the game will knock my level 15 toon down to 5 if the game feels that is what I should be.
Now the times I have grouped up, I have had a blast! Spencer and I took on a level 5 guy at level 2 knowing we were going to die and my bear tank smacked it's ass and we defeated it. Running around to random events was cool. I love how enemies get harder to beat the more people that are around. I love the humor they put in to the game.
So I'm on a fence right now. I REALLY REALLY REALLY wish this was more GW1 style at this point. The story in that game was epic. You felt like it was "your" story and not the story everyone was doing. So far the storyline (Norn) has been pretty meh
A lot of this game is running with a group. You don't even have to play with people you know. When you find people running an event just stick with them. As far as the boredom of soloing, I have yet to get bored doing so, but then again I go out of my way to party up if even with pugs.
For what it's worth, Brian, I spend a lot of time running around reviving downed players so they can get back in the fight. It's a lot of fun for me, and they're always grateful. It may not be dedicated, exactly, but it's there and it's always helpful.
For what it's worth, Brian, I spend a lot of time running around reviving downed players so they can get back in the fight. It's a lot of fun for me, and they're always grateful. It may not be dedicated, exactly, but it's there and it's always helpful.
My only complaint so far is the pet is pretty wimpy and worthless so i have been using him as a follower, buffer, debuff remover. Kind of a light support tank.
Since I like to play support, I learned how to support others by supporting my pet and keeping it alive. If it does go down, swap to the other one and continue. I've also seen that to optimize your loadout/role you want to fill, you may need certain types of pets. For example when I'm felling like I want to swing my sword sword, my steam sword, I'll switch to my ranged pet. If I had a ranged one that also specialized in buffs I would use that one instead but I don't have one like that and don't know if there will be one like that.
But in essence, I agree with you, they are pretty wimpy, but I believe that is intended for two main reasons: so that they are not OP, and to help you learn how to fight. The pet isn't meant to be the power house that you rely on for the whole game. It's both you and the pet.
Gameplay wise, having never played the first one, I like what ArenaNet has done. I see a lot of base MMO mechanics redone in ways new to me. You still run around the world, complete tasks for various NPCs, fight groups of enemies scattered about the land with the occasional boss, but you are rewarded in many ways for exploring the everywhere and anywhere, said tasks are automatically handed to you as a singular bundle when you are near a certain NPC to complete at your leisure, and while you can certainly group up for some overworld bosses you certainly can take em on on your own.
On that note, the skill pool does seem rather small. There are "bundles" (as they are referred to ingame) that give you some new skills as long as you have the bundle, and some skills "stack" (as I call it. Activating the ability brings about one mechanic but you can activate it again to do something else.) to give a variety of more ways to fight, but having learned ALL of my weapon skills before level 10 and bundles being sort of situational, it still seems rather small. I've still got a ways to go to learn all of my utility skills but again that will take time.
There are Achievements in this game but they are made to actually help you out. You get XP and money as well as other rewards for completing them.
There is much more to it all. The story, the group content, the PvP, to name a few. Overall it's refreshing to me and I am enjoying it.
Aaaaahh my lord. I finally got to quest with @Teramona tonight and it was hilarious. Being ten levels higher was not an issue at all - I still hunted around a new area and found weapons in excess of what I was already using. We had a fantastic moment where we Leroy Jenkins'd off a cliff into the middle of a hostile "base" type area and spent a good ten minutes just fighting and picking one another up. It was preeeeeetty great.
I'm pretty worried I won't be playing in a year just because I'll have exhausted the content (and there's no carrot at the end of the stick), but I'm TOLD that people are confident they'll release new, large content fast enough to keep me interested. We'll see.
Ensuring the best possible play experience for our fans is our highest priority. We’ve said before that we would be willing to temporarily disable first-party digital sales if we felt our high player concurrency may compromise player experiences. We have now reached that point.
Effective immediately we have disabled sales via buy.guildwars2.com. To be clear, box and digital sales are still available via our retail partners. We are tracking our concurrency closely while expanding our infrastructure. We’ll re-enable first-party digital sales as soon as we feel that we can do so safely. ~RB2
That's actually really impressive that they're willing to stop selling copies of their in-demand, zero-overhead game to improve the experience for players who are now effectively deadbeats in their business model.
The percentage of players who actually spend money in the in-game store is likely very low. Either way, it's good to hear that they care about the stability of the game, even at the expense of sales.
Exploits - If you discover an exploit in the game, do not exploit it or publicize it, but instead notify us immediately at this new email address: exploits (at) arena (dot) net. This morning there was a widely-publicized, newly-introduced exploit in which specific cultural weapons were selling for one-thousandth of their normal price. We fixed it with an emergency build this morning. We want to thank the vast majority of players who became aware of the issue, responsibly reported it, and did not exploit it. However, a smaller group of players did significantly exploit it, each purchasing hundreds or thousands of these weapons. We permanently banned 3,000 accounts of players who substantially exploited it, and applied 72-hours bans to another 1,000 accounts of players who mildly exploited it.
Comments
ArenaNet's view of the "support" role is just different from what people are accustomed to. In their own words: To that end, there is an extremely diverse set of gear and abilities that promote damage from ever occurring in the first place: shields, damage interception, projectile interception, offensive conditions (debuffs placed on targets to reduce their output), mass regeneration, condition assumption (absorbing debuffs from your party onto you). There's gear that extends the duration of the boons (GW2 lingo for buffs) you may place on players, there are slot skills (GW2 parlance for WoW's talents) that further enhance and extend the aforementioned abilities. There are even weapon configurations that players can carry to orient their entire character towards playing the support role.
All of these characteristics can be assumed by a single player playing, for example, a Guardian, the Paladin-style class that has a preposterously high degree of support abilities at its disposal--if the player itemizes and talents in that direction. And with this perspective, we can begin to see that the "healer" role was one born out of necessity. Combat systems in previous-gen MMOs were not equipped with the dynamism necessary to be support in any other way than "heal and buff", so everyone just played excel with damage in vs. damage out.
Further, the onus of avoiding damage has become and individual responsibility by equipping each player with many of these abilities. Each class in their offensive setups have limited abilities to negate damage, avoid damage, cleanse debuffs and so on. Players cannot just phone it in while the healing corps carries them to victory, so in a very real sense this is probably one of the most symbiotic MMOs ever made.
Auto-piloting the Holy Light button is indeed dead, and not a moment too soon.
Another thing that is almost certainly my fault: I run into my same irks with the leveling system as I did during the betas. I think it's quite possible that I just don't play the game "correctly," but either way, it led to me playing for 3 or 4 hours on Saturday morning and then turning it off.
I'll probably come back to it at some point, but right now I'm just dejected, and it's only my own fault.
Now the times I have grouped up, I have had a blast! Spencer and I took on a level 5 guy at level 2 knowing we were going to die and my bear tank smacked it's ass and we defeated it. Running around to random events was cool. I love how enemies get harder to beat the more people that are around. I love the humor they put in to the game.
So I'm on a fence right now. I REALLY REALLY REALLY wish this was more GW1 style at this point. The story in that game was epic. You felt like it was "your" story and not the story everyone was doing. So far the storyline (Norn) has been pretty meh
But in essence, I agree with you, they are pretty wimpy, but I believe that is intended for two main reasons: so that they are not OP, and to help you learn how to fight. The pet isn't meant to be the power house that you rely on for the whole game. It's both you and the pet.
Gameplay wise, having never played the first one, I like what ArenaNet has done. I see a lot of base MMO mechanics redone in ways new to me. You still run around the world, complete tasks for various NPCs, fight groups of enemies scattered about the land with the occasional boss, but you are rewarded in many ways for exploring the everywhere and anywhere, said tasks are automatically handed to you as a singular bundle when you are near a certain NPC to complete at your leisure, and while you can certainly group up for some overworld bosses you certainly can take em on on your own.
On that note, the skill pool does seem rather small. There are "bundles" (as they are referred to ingame) that give you some new skills as long as you have the bundle, and some skills "stack" (as I call it. Activating the ability brings about one mechanic but you can activate it again to do something else.) to give a variety of more ways to fight, but having learned ALL of my weapon skills before level 10 and bundles being sort of situational, it still seems rather small. I've still got a ways to go to learn all of my utility skills but again that will take time.
There are Achievements in this game but they are made to actually help you out. You get XP and money as well as other rewards for completing them.
There is much more to it all. The story, the group content, the PvP, to name a few. Overall it's refreshing to me and I am enjoying it.
I'm pretty worried I won't be playing in a year just because I'll have exhausted the content (and there's no carrot at the end of the stick), but I'm TOLD that people are confident they'll release new, large content fast enough to keep me interested. We'll see.