PleaseRecycle

I've always liked your style, Uber, must be the Tribes connection. Two of the best games ever made, and the revival isn't half bad itself.

I'm pretty sure that if the original review is okay, this review is okay.

I've found my guardian to be a rollercoaster of efficacy. Sometimes things click and it's great and sometimes I can blow through all of my skills and virtues and feel like I accomplished nothing. l2p? Maybe. Compared to playing even a semi-support character in City of Heroes, though, hard support in Guild Wars is awfully flaccid. Empathy's healing aura would be a massively overpowered ability by Guild Wars standards even if you weren't allowed to enhance it, and reliance on that power has long been rightly mocked on this forum. I don't want my ultimate elite skill, a thing I had to travel the lands to acquire the wherewithal to even unlock and which I can only use every four minutes due to the sheer determination it requires, to be worse than any given power in forcefield. I want to take a tier nine that makes me invincible for three minutes and then at the end I freaking explode and everyone around me is stunned, including the enemies.

You're right, I could explain what I mean better. Basically there are two issues here: Guild Wars does not differentiate players enough for my liking, nor does it force teaming enough for my liking.

Regarding the latter, dungeons are there, you can certainly do them, you'll get prizes for doing so, but they're such a tiny slice of the game. They do not seem particularly popular to me compared to the open zone content, and they're the only place where you really have to team up at all. Indeed, as I said above, in many cases teaming is detrimental to enjoying the bulk of the game's content, that being the stuff you do when wandering around.

Regarding player blandness, Johnny just said it better than I was going to. Everyone starts on a level playing field, everyone can do basically the same stuff and there is pretty much one correct way to play that every competent player* will gravitate toward rapidly.

Another thing that you brought up, theHaunt, is something I also care about: you can get super overpowered in City of Heroes. I don't consider that to be detrimental to teaming because in my experience it just never was. One person on a team can solo everything? Okay, that means you can split up and go twice as fast. Or it means you can divert more aggro to him and plough through enemies together but more quickly and safely. The point is, it's up to you what that means. That element is completely lacking in Guild Wars because everything is so sanitized. They don't want anything to be overpowered and are willing to work very hard to make sure that nothing is. At the same time, everyone has to be a little "overpowered" by City standards since they aren't willing to let any class be deficient in any way, as that would have an impact on soloing. Maybe you like that style of game but it isn't for me.

*By which I mean a generic competent player who always chooses the most optimal numerical solution when given a choice. Obviously real players will choose suboptimal numbers for a wide variety of reasons that don't make them incompetent.

theHaunt, it isn't that City of Heroes is impossible without coordination, or even especially hard, it's that it rewards it. You are motivated to team up with people and the content thusly gated will in my experience result in a teammate interplay that results in talking, coordination and on rare occasions friendship. You can run explore modes with any four other properly geared and leveled people and the only coordination you'll ever need is "hey guardian, get ranged block. kthx." As I said, maybe this is different at high level but they've given me no reason to assume that to be the case and I have a big problem with games that reserve all of the fun for the end.

Indeed, OT. I've been playing with a friend and quite simply it isn't as good as City of Heroes for teaming by any measure. If I bring my highbie along with his lower level character I have to basically pull all of my punches or I kill everything in one hit, exemplaring considered. We can run around zones together but if he's already been to some areas and I've already been to others it becomes pointless to even try to coordinate zone completion with one another, yet if we just focus on filling one person's hearts the other is basically left unrewarded. One nice thing I will say is that the mini-dungeons that contain a boss and treasure chest at the end are actually pretty fun to team up for. Unfortunately I've seen no more than one per zone, while some zones lack them entirely. Like everything else, teaming for them becomes unnecessary as soon as you out-level them a bit.

My problem with the Guild Wars community hasn't been that I've noticed any preponderance of disruptive players, in fact it has all been quite civil in my experience on two different servers. Rather, the game's design does nothing to encourage anything but pick up teams. Maybe there would be a reason to join a guild if you were deeply involved in the PvP but as someone with no interest in that I have no motivation to do anything but treat the chat as a concurrent IRC system as I wander around. The first three dungeons don't require any special coordination beyond the capability of any old PuG and there isn't anything resembling the widely unpopular yet strangely effective minimum player counts for task forces and trials.

Everyone seems to like the world events that appear but are there any that encourage any behavior other than synchronized soloing? If so I haven't seen them.

Gee Mad, that's an interesting way to put it since she's the one who called me an idiot without provocation. So yeah Fey, what is up with the personal attacks?

Are you this vile to people you disagree with in real life, as well?

If they fixed the story quest teaming, they fixed the story quest teaming. I stopped trying because apparently I didn't get the memo. Since that was a small part of my litany of issues with the game, I remain confident in my stance.

Speaking of things that are technically free but at the cost of your soul, Sam and Spyral, if you haven't you should try out Tribes: Ascend, or as no one but me calls it, Tribes 4. I mention it because it is action packed, skill based, and while it has a grind it's all pretty optional. A friend of mine played World of Tanks and complained occasionally of the paying and/or grinding to win. All the paying and grinding in the world aren't going to land the perfect disc shot into the enemy flag carrier's dumb face as he is sailing in to take the match.

The difference is that City of Heroes at least tried to have a narrative, City of Heroes may have been intended to be balanced by was actually balanced by literally no conceivable definition of the word, and City of Heroes wasn't beholden to some weird concept of fairness that seems to exist here but especially elsewhere on the internet.

Defenders are crap for soloing. Defenders can solo nearly anything in the game. Both of those statements are true in City of Heroes and nobody ever yelled "STOP! No more content development until all of this is FIXED!" To put it another way, Cryptic and then Paragon to at least some extent assumed that their players were semi-rational adults capable of evaluating their options and making decisions based on that. Not everyone had to be the same, not everything had to be created equivalent. Look at Guild Wars: every class can solo everything at precisely the same rate. Every class has essentially the same access to single target DPS, aoe DPS, healing, buffs and debuffs.

"But at level 80..." Let me stop you right there, I don't care about level 80. I'm never going to get to level 80 because I'm not patient enough to repeat the necessary impersonal clusterloves to fill in all of those requisite golden hearts. It isn't that I object to being able to solo in Guild Wars, I object to the fact that there is absolutely no reason to ever team except in dungeons, which are much worse than task forces but I assume they're similar to something from WoW. Hell, you can't team on the story quests, what's the deal with that?

Maybe the issue is that I only like instances and Guild Wars basically doesn't have any. I feel that there is a bit more to it than that, though, and I sadly suspect that there will never be another game made with this one's design philosophy because the company brass wouldn't have it.

For the first day or two I was with you on that, Spyral. By "that" I mean that exploratory feeling that you get with a big game. Everquest was what came to mind, in a good way. The times I had running around, uhhh... EverLand with my level 30 magician, who was level 30 for several months right up to my cancellation of billing, were memorable just for the anticipation of what I'd run into next.

Everquest did it better than Guild Wars 2 and one of the many reasons for that is that the fact that you can instantly teleport anywhere takes what could be a pretty big world and shrinks it terribly. The reason they did that, of course, was to make the drip feed more compelling: don't worry, you don't have to walk all the way over to that new story quest, just teleport there in exchange for our carefully measured moneysink tax. That's in keeping with every single major design choice in the game: when ArenaNet had to choose between making you work for something really cool or just giving everyone the same crappy, impossible-to-get-angry-about version of it, they went with option B every time.

The thing about Everquest was that it only took me a few months to realize that I wasn't playing the game the way I was supposed to. I was supposed to be grinding like everyone else. The reason I didn't have to was that they did a bad job balancing the game to require me to. ArenaNet did a very good job of reaching that balance and killed my buzz all the more quickly for it.

Don't read this paragraph, or really anything I've written here, if you don't want to hear some cynicism but today, bored of my level 52 guardian, I looked to my last character slot and wondered what I'd make next. A norn? No, I already ran through those areas on my human guardian. An asura? No, I already... I think you can see where this is going. Why bother? The only real advancement comes with the scaling of Mt. Grind, whose dizzying heights will surely claim many lives in Korean net cafes. Apart from that, everyone and everything is interchangeable. The new game smell is great but when it faded I was left wondering how new this ride really was.

Oh yeah, and I guess you didn't specifically accuse me of this but I'm not trying to boycott NCSoft, I simply would have done a little more research if I'd known what we learned four days later. I boycott NCSoft in much the same way that I boycott EA, Ubisoft and Activision: I don't buy any of their games because they are all the same. This was pretty much the only good MMO by virtue of running unopposed.

It's like WoW in that both of them are about delivering a constant trickle of pap that has no risk of offending or exciting anyone. Don't worry, everyone, our game is a safe place for you to log on after work and earn various rewards! You don't like teaming? That's great, we don't want you to have to do any of that! Don't worry about balance, it's been tuned by our team of Swiss watchmakers to ensure perfect adherence to our predetermined curve at all times. Hey, I know your type... you like customizing your appearance, don't you! I've got one word for you: dye! Your chainmail can be a whole rainbow of unique pastels!

Go on, tell me something that was really fun that you did in Guild Wars yesterday. I played for several hours this morning and I don't remember a single thing that happened. Either I've got extra-early onset Alzheimer's or that's because nothing did. Bonus point if you can tell me something that thousands of other people did not do in exactly the same way.

I bought Guild Wars 2 after succumbing to Rock Paper Shotgun's hype rather more rapidly than I was hoping I would. Had I waited a couple days I would have been more hesitant to spend the money on it, which would really have been for the best. It may be the sleekest, most streamlined WoW-alike yet, but boy howdy is it ever one of those.

Who cares how refined it is when there isn't really anything to do? Your character is identical to every other character of the same class and level except as far as your preferred weapon (hint: it's greatswords) and the amount of grinding you're willing to subject yourself to to earn more shinies. Even if you go wild with dungeon loot you're still one of ten thousand spooky clones instead of one of a hundred thousand.

Nothing you do in the game matters and they never pretend that it might matter. Why am I fighting worms in this ice cave? Because a marker on my map said I'd get prizes if I did so. Why are the mole people of Greater Fireland entirely hostile and murderous yet in neighboring Frostburg they comprise the friendly townsfolk? That's a stupid question as none of the NPCs are meant to do anything but provide the expected window dressing to your generic fantasy experience. The story quests are somehow a step backwards from that; if you think it's funny to be trying to save the... world? From dragons I think??? ... because you wanted to be a circus clown but it just didn't work out at level one, the luster may have worn slightly by level 40. As will have the writing, hand-picked and un-crumpled from the dumpster behind Bioware.

The weapon skill system seems fun at first until you realize that your profession realistically has one or maybe two combinations that are competitive in any way and the realization sets in that you are on track to have either four or eight combat skills for the entire game plus an auto attack and some vaguely more varied buffs. Exceptions exist but compared to City of Heroes, mein Gott.

Top it off with one of the grindiest endgames I've personally ever seen and you have a recipe for something that will be forgotten by yours truly before Torchlight 2 comes out. I could have given those sixty dollars to charity, but I guess that probably wasn't likely. Anyone who is on the fence though? Save yourself twenty dollars and buy Dark Souls instead.

Thanks for putting up with us, not just to Zwill but to everyone who has had the pleasure of having to do so!

Wow, well I didn't see that one coming. I was really looking forward to issue 24, too, just as I suspect Paragon was looking forward to launching it. What else can be said apart from great job on all that cool stuff? I hope the mystery project is still on track and ends up being even half as refreshing as City of Heroes always has been.

Well said, UberGuy.

Big shoutout to my man Ernesto Hess. Ran that with a friend almost every day for a few weeks a couple years ago, I think we got it down to ~17 minutes just with us taking the objectives and six randomly selected lovely assistants along for the ride. I bet a team of eight speeders could probably do it in about twelve minutes. My horrible internet back then didn't help either!

Similarly, Kal is pleasing to blast through in under 20. Really any TF where a determined squad can take care of it in under a third of the expected completion time is a good one. As Arky said, though, some of the longer ones like Manti are also fun since one old hand can easily dazzle a pick up team with well-deployed shortcuts.

Counting overwhelming force, claws gets a 100% chance to knockdown power on as short a timer as you want effectively. It does better DPA than throw spines and focus is better than impale. The only drawback is the follow up thing. I would argue that with overwhelming force taken into account, claws is one of the best ranged sets in the game with two whole powers. I don't think spines can catch up.