Amusing GW2 review - light profanity

Shared loot and xp is somethin CoH did- it was not as advanced as in guild wars (you still had to team), but it was something CoH did.

Rewards for exploring are, too, something CoH did... even though it is not as advanced as in GW2.

Giant Monster like enemies that (most of the time) require teams or even leagues to defeat, and spawn in the overworld free of quests and such. Lusca is probably the most notable example, as it is exceedingly hard to beat alone without a rather expensive build. And even with a rather expensive build, chances are you're gonna die a few times.

The use of a cell phone and an exit button in CoH *helped* to curb running all over the map and backtracking through instances you've already cleared. I'd say CoV does it better, actually. The contacts there tend to give you their number after a quest or two, and the arcs tend to stay in one area. Again, GW2 took this idea and improved upon it, completely eliminating running all over the map dozens of times.

So yes, some of the ideas are based off of what CoH (and many other games) have done, and then those ideas were improved upon.

Of course, there are things that CoH did that GW2 did not, but... that is more a difference in target audience and genre than anything else. Namely, the lack of gear covering up your painstakingly crafted costume and the unrestricted movement. Both of those are things that go against the very core of games like GW2, and thus cannot be implemented. For instance, the ability to fly would make all the jumping puzzles instantly obsolete, as well as making dodging much, much easier. In order for flight to work, it has to be limited (like in Aion), or intended from the start (like here). Here there are no jumping or climbing puzzles, and whether something hits or misses is determined the instant the attack starts, not by whether or not you were within the line of the attack when it went off.

EDIT: PR, what's up with the personal attacks? We were having a reasonable discussion, no reason for those.

From this thread, I will not be going to GW. It apparently completely lacks something that I have been lucky to have from CoH, and I don't think that I'll be able to make that transition.

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?

The thing about the community is that it'll probably get better. Games that encourage teaming and helping eachother out tend to enourage a better community as well. The game just launched though, so the general rabble of teenagers who just learned what curse words are will dominate the forums and the chat. Once those players grow up, and more mature players take residence, it'll get better.

Probably.

Or it could turn out like WoW and be terrible forever. I'm not exactly a psychic, but my guess is that it'll get better.

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.

"Basically doesn't have any" - I'm supposed to apologize because you said that?

Also, the launcher didn't say you couldn't team for story quests. The launcher never contains patch notes. There's links to the daily notes now, but they pretty much were just posting patch notes on Reddit. And the patch notes said there was a bug and that sometimes, parties couldn't stay together for instances, but that they were working on it. There were workarounds, and again, my partner and I have duo'd every story instance.

So no, not gonna apologize because you said "and you can't even group for the story instances." You didn't say "there's a bug and I personally couldn't group for them," you made it sound like the game didn't HAVE that option. Just like you made it sound like the game didn't have instances.

Not to even mention the rest of your rant that was totally off-base.

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.

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.

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.

How about we all just agree to disagree, yeah? This isn't getting us anywhere.

For the people interested, I suggest you do your own research. Delve into the wiki, go check some reviews, watch some gameplay videos. It isn't going to be for everyone, mind you. But it is worth looking into.

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.