Amusing GW2 review - light profanity

Nah, I get that. I HATED SWTOR SO MUCH for not letting me move stuff around and resize it. I customize EVERY UI I get my hands on. Most of the time, that's my #1 add-on need, in games that allow add-ons. Arranging my g-d bars full of g-d skills.

The funny thing is that I naturally arrange my UI in all games... pretty much exactly the way GW2 UI is set up. So for the first time, I'm totally happy with a game that doesn't let me muck with the UI and have 8 million bars. Because extra bars are not needed, and everything's pretty much where I want it.

Oh and yeah. I play with 4 bars open automatically on any COH character. When they get near 50-ish, I open a fifth and put all my vet reward/travel powers like ATT, Oro, Base/Mission porter, Reveal, etc on that because I need the prime bar space for actual stuff. One of my favorite things in GW2 is the lack of power bloat.

Heh, oh Sam. You're just not the MMO audience. And I don't say like that a bad thing - it's just how it is.

Personally? One of the things I enjoy most is those popup nodes. I see them on my minimap and RUN for them. Oh, there's another one! And one over there! And OMG carrots I need those so much, tons of mobs on them, I will totally kill them for those carrots!! And now... wait, where the eff am I? How did I get all the way across the map?? Those gathering dots are like candy for me >.>

And I'm doing cooking - Haunt is doing all the other crafting because I just can't be arsed to duplicate stuff he's doing - and it's a giant pain in the butt. But it's also sort of realistic to real cooking. And (ok, here's my squee) you can cook all vegetarian. Most of the food you can make has a vegetarian version recipe. Which, for me personally, who has 2 vegetarian characters and has always had to pretend in other MMOs (except COH, where our only food is sweet, sweet Insp-Skittles) that she isn't really eating meat... she really doesn't have to.

In order to make sage-stuffed mushrooms, I have to first make sage stuffing and grilled mushrooms, and then combine them for the higher level recipes. I enjoy that so much. It's probably just me, but I'm one of those people who really gets a kick out of crafting.

And everything we make has been usable so far. Haunt makes us a new set of armor/weapons/jewelry every 5 levels, and very rarely do we get better drops to replace them with. Though I will often replace it with quest gear if I find something pretty that I like the look of better.

TL;DR - some of us enjoy the heck out of mining and crafting. It's not necessarily a weakness in the game if you don't.

It's awesome!

1. I can both resize, and move things around in SWTOR.
2. There appear to be outside customization mods that go farther

Either something changed since you played or you missed the in game options (which admittedly I stumbled across by accident in my first 10 levels of playing.)

Now, I cannot appear to change colors, and wish I could change it more, but it sure let's you. So I can't let you say that it isn't possible.

Also, I am not a fan of outside mods, as then you have issues post patch, etc. But it is an option.




Yeah, I think I'm like Sam in regards to, I played CoH because the character customization and game play was awesome fun. It just happened to be a shared play environment. I am enjoying and chose SWTOR post-CoH because it is pretty much a sequel of KotOR which was one of my favorite solo games of all time.


As to crafting, I like it sometimes, and hate it others. I think there is a place for it but it can be intrusive when it shouldn't be.

I'm sure it has. I stopped playing after the free month, and left my whole guild of the last 4 years behind because I couldn't stand the game - it's not an MMO, it's a co-op version of KOTOR with really poorly thought out MMO trappings tossed on as an afterthought. It was literally the worst MMO I'd ever played - all the way up to 50 it was fun, and then you hit 50 and it's just like "here, play these same instances you played on the way up over and over and over for a chance at random loot drops. Same with PvP. Enjoy!" Just, no.

Most of my guild's gone back to our old game now (LOTRO) though our guild leader and a few diehards grimly cling to the game they've invested in, even though even they admit they don't really enjoy it and they're basically "waiting for changes" to most of the systems. Eff that - I'm not paying a game or playing to grind while waiting for it to be fixed when I've got games RIGHT NOW that I can actually enjoy playing, y'know?

But yeah, when I stopped, the only things you could move were the chat window and the map, and add-ons weren't allowed.

Yeah, the moving/resizeable UI was introduced with much fanfare somewhere between 3 and 5 months after SWTOR's launch, I don't remember more specifically than spring. Did they add more bars yet? Because frankly the UI was clunky to begin with, but the bigger problem was that even with 5 12-slot bars, I didn't have anywhere near enough space to keep all of my skills and necessary consumables handy, and they have since then added even MORE crap to hotkey with Legacy Skill unlocks.

Seriously, that game has skill bloat that would make LotRO green with envy. Well, once LotRO is able to find the "Turn Green with Envy" button on their bars, anyway...

Four for me is just STANDARD. Tray 1 is attacks, tray 2 is buffs or mezzes or utility powers, tray 3 is toggles. All my characters have 4 visible trays, and a 5th I flip over to with zone teleports. I don't know what YOU play, but it must not be MMs, or characters with mostly clickies, or anything with travel powers and teleports and fortune buffs and temp powers and accolades. Cause some of my characters use six or seven trays in total.

Originally Posted by PRAF68_EU Dispari has more than enough credability, and certainly doesn't need to borrow any from you.

Yeah, SWTOR's UI customization was introduced in the much-ballyhooed 1.2 Patch, sometime around April, IIRC. As far as I know, you still can't have more than five ability bars on the screen at the same time, though. And you're right; SWTOR is one of the few games in which I would actually want more than five bars on my screen. Talk about faux complexity; the game has ability bloat out the yin-yang, but build options are about as shallow as your average bird bath.

Builds that are predicated on DoT applications and/or situational triggers (on-crit talents, for instance) are still a nightmare to play even with the customizable UI; AFAIK the only visual cues for such builds (like my Sage) are the tiny little icons under the opponent's status bar, which can be moved, but who really wants to have a UI element sitting in the center of the screen?

So anyway, SWTOR's UI is customizable, but it still needs work. The UI's a pretty minor issue for me*, but I can understand why Bioware got hammered over it; if you're gonna design a game in 2012 that copies WoW's gameplay so slavishly, then you have to accept that all the rest of your features will be slavishly compared with WoW's.

* - My disappointment with the game, as a long-time Bioware fan, is more of the death-by-a-thousand-cuts variety. They got the story right, and almost nothing else. And even TOR's story is vaguely annoying simply because the rest of the MMO experience is so lackluster; if you want to play through for the story, you're constantly reminded that the story would be so much better if it weren't stretched so thin, mixed with obvious filler, and stripped of all meaningful choices for the sake of the MMO leveling curve.

In a way, CoH handles story better than SWTOR. The latter's story is arguably more immersive and more (for lack of a better term) front-and-center, but at least CoH generally lets you concentrate on one story at a time, rather than doing a class quest, and a planet quest, and a bajillion side quests, all at the same time, in long chunks based not on your character's obvious motivations, but rather, on your geographical location. Quest-hub style questing takes all of the urgency out of the story. "So you say my ally is wounded in an enemy base and taking heavy fire? Suuuure, I'll be there ASAP, and by ASAP, I mean after I handle this other dude's gopher quest, and that guy's data-gathering task, and this gal's code-breaking mission ... and who am I kidding? By the time I get there I won't even remember why I'm going there, but hey, the map highlights the entrance to the instance, so whatevs."

Originally Posted by Iggy_Kamakaze Nice build

"I remember that! Stupid tree!"

Awesome - you will be happy to know GW2 fits this perfectly with the personal story, and thankfully you don't have to cooperate with anyone when you aren't doing your personal story.

Just watch - someone will jump up and immediately explain how that isn't something they are interested in.

Like the previous post, just watch: someone will say 'but... but... CoH had this too!' Which not only isn't true, but isn't the point, because he wasn't talking about it - it was aimed more at WoW and such.

That's unfair and I think you know why: they have voice-overs and cut-scenes that play out according to the options you chose, not to mention the fact that the game is less than two weeks old. I understand why people would love to have any story they come up with have full voice-overs and cut scenes but that's impossible - even with AE.

It's hard for me to pass an opportunity to bash Diablo 3, so excuse me for a long ramble. Feel free to skip if you want. To say it was a massive disappointment is the understatement of the year.

It's probably too late for them to fix issues like the mostly unrandom dungeons, lack of reasons to play the same class twice, awful story (that is constantly in your face), and extremely short quest line. But if I'm going to bash the game for anything, I really have to take aim at the gear.

I mean, it works at first, in a very shallow way. But it quickly becomes evident that any piece of gear you obtain only needs 3 or 4 specific affixes, and every person who plays your class needs those exact same affixes. There are 4 base stats and your character only needs two (always Vitality and then whatever your prime stat is).

To anyone who hasn't had the opportunity to be disappointed by this game yet, let me explain to you how the gear system works at high levels. Let's say you're a Wizard and you kill a monster, and it drops a "blue" sword, and a "blue" spear (also a "white" mace that's just there to litter the ground, but let's ignore that).

The two blue weapons are "rares." You already have a "yellow" "legendary" Wand equipped. However, you need to pick up each blue weapon individually and look at its stats, because unlike similar games, the name of the weapon (e.g. "Shocking Sword of Swiftness") has no bearing on either the number of properties it has or what their values are. A blue item can have up to 6 properties, and you can only find out what they are by picking up the weapon and looking at it. The "Shocking" part of the description can mean it does 20-35 extra Lightning damage or 200-450, even for items that are the same level.

When you do look at the weapons, you might come up with this:
- Blue Sword: +20 lightning damage, final DPS = 200
- Blue Spear: +15 gold dropping %, final DPS = 890
- Yellow Wand: +6 mana per kill, +30 damage, + 10 min damage, final DPS = 620

These numbers are not exagerated. It's absolutely routine to find weapons that do a quarter of the damage of other weapons of the same level. That's because even the base damage of weapons is variable: three swords laid next to each other all will have different damage values. (In CoH terms, this would be like having two recipes of the same type and level, except one boosts the power by 15% and the other boosts it by 75%, so you have to examine every one of them before deciding what to throw back).

But wait--this is a Wizard. Who cares about their weapon DPS, right? Well, this game does, a lot. Every single power that does damage is based on your weapon damage. Doesn't matter if that weapon is a bow, a spear, a wand, or a two-handed battle axe. If you can equip it, your spells are based on its damage.

What it comes down to is that you are constantly finding gear everywhere, and almost all of it is unuseful. So then what you end up doing is going to the game's auction house, and buying your gear there. At which point, the whole reason for playing--searching for gear--vanishes. There is literally nothing else to do, except farm for equipment to sell to other players.

/endrant

Why is it "unfair" to judge a game because it is two weeks old? Look at my join date. I didn't play City of Heroes until it was four or five years in.

Why would I spend time playing something I don't enjoy playing based on how old or new it is? In other words, why are some people concerned about players NOT playing Guild Wars for whatever reason? Do they think that if they went to the WoW, DCUO, CO, or whatever forum and asked, that some people wouldn't have reasons for preferring their current game to GW? Not trying to be testy but it shouldn't surprise anyone that some players of a game prefer the game they are playing to some other game. Of course players of City of Heroes tend to like City of Heroes. That's a forgone conclusion.

IMO what would be truly unfair would be to give GW a free pass that I didn't give to other MMOs. I didn't play or like them much either, even when they were new. I just don't want to put money or time into something I don't enjoy much.


PS: I don't expect, or want, voice overs or cut scenes related to my character's origin.

Maybe it's because most people in CoH don't PvP by choice so they aren't interested in PvP in other games either.

Definite correlation, but not always true though... I hate the PvP in CoX, although i will PvP in Eve Online and GW....

The reason I don't PvP in this game is because it quite frankly sucks.

If I were to encounter a good PvP system, I'd play it without hesitation.

I just wanted to say thank you for pointing out the in-game story-line options. I thought you were kidding, so I looked it up. Evidently those are real story-lines. Because this, combined with everything else the GW2 players have been talking about in this thread, cemented my desire to never, ever play this game.

And to the GW2 players: I'm not saying it's a bad game. I'm just saying that this is not my MMO.

I don't think it's unfair, and I wish some of the other pro-GW2 boosters in this thread and others would back off a little. Correcting misinformation or giving people a broader idea of what the game has to offer is one thing - acting like a new convert who wants them to take a copy of The Watchtower is something else. Seriously, folks, don't push. Geeze.

Personally, OT, I don't want those things either. I take them as an entertainment, I use what I like and I discard the rest. No one else gets to make decisions for my characters except me. Watching my toon's mouth move and a voice and words not my own come out makes me CRINGE. However, the rest of the game is good enough for me to just run through the stories as entertainment, divorced from what my character may be doing. I had pacifist characters in COH who I played the same way - in-game missions didn't always equal what my character was doing.

That's not a good correlation. I've PvPed in all the MMOs I've played, and after trying COH's PvP, I had no interest in it. The PvP here was BAD - that doesn't mean PvPers didn't play the game for other reasons, and save PvPing for better venues.

Fair enough. TSW looks like a great game - 2 of my best friends are playing it. It's not for me. I don't think it's a bad game, quite the contrary - but it's not for me. I don't anyone needs their arm twisted over their video game activities.

But what if you're like me or Sam and you're playing a female character but you have a deep guy voice (or does Sam have a girlie voice)? I wouldn't want to hear my voice coming from the mouth of my female characters

PS: I usually prefer making male characters though I have female ones.

Most of those things were also present in Diablo II.

4 Stats with only Vitality and class stat really important.

Items that required you to pick up and identify to get their hard stats beyond a vague idea. Weapon whose base damage range vary by sub class where that normal speed long sword may end up doing less DPS than a faster but lower base damage rapier depending on bonuses.

That most drops are like most enhancement drops in our game, just something to trade for money because you can't use it or you already have something better.

Okay, Wizard is kind of screwed up if all spell damage is based on the equipped weapon, I'll give you that.