(on Wikipedia)
https://www.guildwars2.com/en/

A great MMORPG with spectacular mechanics but no endgame.

I had a lot of fun with it way back when, but my most recent visit had me wandering around in circles for an inexcusable length of time. An utter failure. Still highly recommended.

Table of Contents [hide]

1 Links
- 1.1 Official
- 1.2 Other
2 2022-02-11 - 124490
3 2018-07-09 - 90153
4 2016-12-20
5 2015-11-20
6 2015-09-17
7 Earlier notes
- 7.1 Grinding

Links ∞

Official ∞

Other ∞

old:

2022-02-11 - 124490 ∞

on Windows 10 Home.

I don't know how to get into this. I don't know what's going on and I guess I have to make a new character to re-learn everything.
The elementalist is ridiculously complicated.
It was fucking annoying to figure out how a bank works, the interface sucks.
I have some sort of "black lion trading company" "delivery box" but I don't know what that is. I have to find some symbol but it's annoying to squint at the map and look around. Why is this hard? I found it and have to run AAaallalalllalllllll the way there but now I can't get in because of some sort of ticket I have to get. Just fucking mail me my money.
Switching back and forth on the map is too slow because of the animation.
I had to switch characters MANY times to figure out why one of them couldn't see some of the stuff in the same fucking city.
- It ended up being on another "level"..
God damn the UI is so slow to animate.
For the trading company, the "take all" button is still active even when you have nothing to pick up.
When changing a build for the underwater abilities, it still displays possible elite skills even when they're not usable.
In character creation, there's no randomize body type feature.
I have no way to know what a class is before making one and levelling it..
I had to look up how to hide the mesmer mask; what a stupid thing.
Character height is not taken into account on the cutscene quest screens.
My character's voice does not fit the shape.
Who the hell is Bjarni and why am I bringing him rabbit food?
- Oh, he's way on the opposite side of where everything is, so there's no point in me trying to participate with anything that isn't right next to him. Bad design.
Wander around to get to a vista, and when using the vista it shows me where I wandered around. Sad.
God it's tedious to have to keep clicking through the jiggly shiny reward boxes at the bottom-right. I don't fucking care, stop ruining my immersion.

2018-07-09 - 90153 ∞

I still can't easily tell where to go on the map. I have to constantly zoom out, scroll somewhere, then zoom in to look for the little number markers.
There are just too many abilities, and I find things confusing. I want the elementalist to be good, but there are too many abilities to memorize and swap between.
I'm playing by mashing buttons without really feeling how things are playing out. I just set up my abilities with forethought and while in combat I mash away.. confusing and boring..

While ultimately it's a gorgeous and well-made game, it has a kind of complexity I can't deal with. Maybe if I gave it a really good chance I would play it again, but that's not going to happen.

2016-12-20 ∞

It took me quite some time to figure out how to even download the client. Even after logging in. Even after finding an installation FAQ with direct instructions. Fucking bloody hell people..
Oh god, making a human Rogue has the most fucking annoying background sounds ever.
.. and a human engineer is just as bad. What's the deal?
It isn't clear what the character personality choices during character creation actually mean..
The rogue and the engineer have a hood and head thing, and I'm asked to pick colours for it. For the rogue, I didn't want to have one at all but there was no option.. In both cases I would later get another screen which asked me to customize that thing. That customization should come first.
Both the engineer and rogue ask me about some sort of specialty, but there is no explanation as to what that means. The best I can figure is that it's only a piece of gear. Can I change it later?
Can I change my colour selection later?
The human first mission is confusing - I thought there was a bug that refused to let me in.
How do I view a cutscene again, after I've seen it already?
The engineering gun is too loud.
Viewing my worn equipment is retardedly hard.
I was wandering around the human home town and I could not figure out how to find whomever the letter I got was telling me to meet. I wandered around and around and around three times, and visited every waypoint and entered bunches of houses.. I don't know where my home is. Maybe it should be, I don't know, labelled? Maybe with a fucking teleport? I had to run all the way back up into the city, all the way over, all the way around and around for nothing.

.. uninstalled. This is unforgivable. I'll keep this marked as loved, as I would definitely recommend it for others who manage to get anywhere.

Maybe I could just play my max level character, but everything was so overwhelmingly complicated that I needed to delete a character and start a new one all over.. three times before I could maybe find a class I could deal with. I hate not knowing how one will remotely turn out.

2015-11-20 ∞

I decided to take another glance at this game, and..

I was entirely overwhelmed when logging in. I don't know what goes where or how things work. The heroes screen is really overwhelming compared to what I remember.
It looks like endgame content was added, which pleases me.. but I don't know where to go or what to do, I guess these would be things that guild would be doing. I'd expect that.
The 64-bit client is in beta.
I shouldn't have accepted a mail I was given. Now it's taking up inventory space.
I have over-maximum of some crafting materials, so my bag is 1/3 full of crap.
There aren't enough character slots for me to reroll and learn everything from scratch. So I have no way to get over the overwhelming nature of things.
It automatically assigned stuff when I logged in, based on how I was specced out before. Except I was experimenting and so.. am I stuck with a shitty build? I don't know, I can't remember how to play.
It appears that adding a character slot and a bunch of other things requires payment. It's the character slot thing which bothers me the most.

I. FUCKING. HATE. JUMPING. PUZZLES. I uninstalled because of this.

I didn't give it much of a chance, which is a shame.

2015-09-17 ∞

I haven't played Guild Wars 2 in quite some time. Back when I was burning out from World of Warcraft I gave this a shot and really really liked it.

I applaud the developers hiding subtle nooks and puzzles in the world. Even to me, they don't seem frustrating at all.

There is, however, no endgame. "Raiding" might exist if there were instanced fights, but there aren't any. When I left, there was a mob of people running around in circles kill-grinding "bosses".

Mechanics like downlevelling when entering into a lower level area are fantastic.

I don't recall there being much of any variation or customization in characters. There is some, but it's incomplete.

Earlier notes ∞

https://web.archive.org/web/20170929210916/https://forum-en.guildwars2.com/forum/game/gw2/Raiding-endgame-is-there-but-never-played

I found these in a working text file from my earliest experiences.

There are no character name suggestions.
The main goblin city is a horrifying maze. It took me FOREVER to figure out where the engineering trainer was.
After being given a lot of soloable events, unsoloable semi-possible stupid ones are given. Get through half way, then get completely smashed in the second half, wasting your time. Respawn rates are insanely high in some circumstances, making careful killing impossible.
I find it annoying to not be able to press 1, 2, etc to go through dialog.
Pressing escape should not stop me moving.
I cannot hold a mouse button down and call up the map to turn while auto-running.
Minimap textures can take a while to load in after using a fairly distant waypoint.
Boss mobs are horrifyingly difficult. The scaling from fighting normal stuff to them is horrible. It must be assumed that everyone in the area is helping. Being one-shot is not fun.
All the knockdowns humans experience in their starting area is not fun.
Cannot hold a mouse button down and then use the scroll wheel to zoom in.
Dashing stops auto-running.
Weapon effects are actually intensely boring, and what they do moves around. So I cannot, for example, rely on button 3 being AoE no matter what weapon I have equipped. This is something I'd solve with macros in WoW.
There are unskippable cutscenes, like the human's elemental boss thing.
Cannot zoom in on the paperdoll.
Cannot move the location of the paperdoll during character creation. Particularly tall, short or wide characters are not properly visible.
I get "new event near" notifications, and have absolutely no idea what direction they are in, until I'm next to them. The map has no indicators until then.
Holy shit, you actually cut down saplings.
Wow, there are actually invisible walls in places.
Minions don't heal over time, not even out of combat? Can't be healed by abilities? Bah.
When looking at things in the auction house, it doesn't compare to what's currently worn.
Comparison tooltips don't work for off-set items.
Comparison tooltips don't work when disenchanting.
Soulbound stuff which you can't use is offered by the reputation-rewards vendor.
Things which are not disenchantable are not identified as such.
The tooltip for luck-related items should say that the improvement is permanent. I held on to mine until I finally looked the mechanic up.
Your target is not identified as a dot on your mini-map.
As usual, they don't have the proper range of slash commands for emotes. Why can't these people copy MUDs and additionally allow user-created ones?
There's no /clear
There's no easy way to tell what things on a map you haven't visited.
Event markers can cover up a point of interest marker.
The launcher displays "downloading" briefly, even when there's nothing to download.
Human necromancer doesn't have a way to adjust the colours of their shoulders?
Auto-attack turns off when a necromancer changes forms.
When blocking, there is no feedback, no text that says it did anything.
Humans 1-15 is great, but outside of that area it starts to fall apart. You have to grind to get some levels before you can do any of the newly-available content. I did a bit, and was rather careful and lucky.. managing to get to level 20 before being sent on a goose chase way through land I'm far too low level for.
Is there a target-of-target feature?
While there's a way to combine bags for your inventory, you can't do it when looking at your bank. Also, why the hell is there a separate panel for one's inventory when looking at the bank?
There's no way to search the auction house for only items you can actually use.
The auction house doesn't have a search feature to restrict to specific qualities, or a specific quality and higher.
When searching the auction house, the "Show Filters" is animated. Fuck off, animation, nobody loves you.
Searching in the auction house should be the motherfucking default.
Entering the auction house has an animation.
Why have the next/previous at the auction house search listings. Just do an AJAX-style scrollable list. Or have a scrollable list for each page of 100 items or something better. Or maybe just have the scroll wheel do a previous/next. When using the scroll wheel, have a minor delay between page flips, to make sure that a person spinning their wheel won't go more than one page at a time unless they really want to.
There's no way to tell your range to a target.
Cutscenes don't appear to take the player's height into account.
The npcs are very chatty and repetitive sometimes.
What the hell, it kicks me out of a dungeon before I can click accept on a reward.
LFG .. doesn't transport me to the dungeon? I don't see what to do after being put in a group.
LFG lists dungeons in areas I've never been to, for story lines not appropriate for me. It doesn't have dungeons for all appropriate level ranges in places which my race would most likely be interested in.
Hard Shelled Crab should be Hard-Shelled Crab.
Also, why in the fuck would Hard Shelled Crab sit there and regenerate if it's invulnerable. Don't make our lives hell by making us wait to kite the thing into a trap.
Motherfucking playable cutscenes. Why bother having campaign episodes if there's no challenge in my fighting in them. It's completely inconsistent, with trash often being harder than a boss.
Why would a campaign have me view a chat-cutscene, then end it and have me walk to another person and talk to them for another chat-cutscene with another character?
Motherfucking minigames. This isn't what I bought the game for. It's especially annoying to have this shit cooked-in and I'm forced to get through it to get through the storyline. Jumping puzzles is one thing, but in the middle of my personal quest line is bullshit. Trebuchets, or anything else.. stupid.
The Enhanced Ettin can easily be kited around by stepping from the step down into the water.
When talking to npc a, I cannot talk to npc b and automatically abort the speech with npc a.
In the options panel, middle-clicking on a slider should jump the bar to that position. It looks like there is no significant Linux influence on their developers.
TODO - make shift-s sit.

Grinding ∞

I was running around in a loop in the near-beginner area. It was a pile of people all trying to catch up, and was quite fun. This is the sort of thing which needed to be done by players to have some sort of enthusiastic world participation.

guildwarstemple.com for timers
boar-oak-troll-bandit-spider-(wasp)
ojon-phin-vale-(follow)-kryten-()
spider/wasp are north of kryten, east of (ojon)
troll is NW of kryten in cave
PVK - phinney-vale-kryten
spider is NE of kryten

Last updated 2022-02-11 at 16:49:32

spiralofhope

Guild Wars 2 - (2012 game)