So How is Everybody Holding Up?

[Sirian]

Are the ranks of RB GW players growing, holding steady, or shrinking?

Has anybody grown disillusioned? Or you all having a blast?

How high are the fun quotients for those playing this one extensively?


Just keeping tabs. There's still a remote possibility, down the road, that I would give this thing a second chance. Whether I do or not, though, I am curious about how well it is treating the rest of you.


- Sirian

[Zed-F]

The ranks of RB GW players seem to be slowly growing. There are often over a half-dozen on any given evening without any kind of formal organization going on at all.

I have not tried PvP. PvE is pretty fun. I have grown tired of my mesmer; the class doesn't seem really well-suited for PvE as a primary class, but I expect would be better for PvP or in some cases as a secondary class. She has finished the game and I have gotten most of the skills of her two classes so it's time to switch characters anyway. I will certainly build at least 3 characters so I can at least dabble in all 6 professions. Assuming the rest of the guild sticks with the game I expect I'll eventually try all 6 professions as primary classes. And I'll be trying to organize a GW team event (dare I say variant?) once Samurai completes its run, if not sooner.

I would say the fun factor is on a par with D2. It's certainly worth the price of the game in my books, but whether it flies for the ultra-long haul depends more on the community you're playing with (or whether you really dig PvP) than anything else. Sometimes it can seem a bit repetitious, although there are some things you can do once you've been through the game for the first time to speed things up a bit.

[SoulEdge]

Need more time for gaming!

I have quested happily with guild mates up to about Lion Arch and then my gaming time was drastically reduced.

Nowadays when I do log in, I usually do so to check the sigil price.

EDIT: just read my private message, so deleted the bit about guild leader.

[Thecla]

Well, I have to say I stopped playing GW. It was fun for a while, but then got on the tedious side, I thought -- a bit too close to Dungeon Siege -- though, unlike DS, I don't regret trying out GW. Moreover, in the long run, I personally am not so interested in the PvP aspects of GW, which are probably the thing that makes the end-game tick, so that didn't provide much incentive to continue.

Perhaps part of this was external factors, busy with other things and less patience with games than before.

I also dropped out of WoW after playing it fairly intensively for a while -- actually a better and more interesting game than GW IMO, and really a lot of fun at the lower levels -- but I also couldn't see myself doing raids or battlegrounds there, and actually felt relieved to jump off the MMORPG treadmill.

I could, however, see taking up either of GW or WoW again in a casual way if time and inclination permitted.

[KingOfPain]

Simply put, I would recommend the game.

The game is well balanced, there is nothing (major) broken, afaik. I was just saying to Cy I like the fact that even high lvl chars can get their ass kicked in low lvl area if they are not careful.

The game (can) gets better when cooping with RBers or other coop friendly folks - Even tho I wish one can equip more than just 8 skills (I would be happy with 10) it does make for some hard decisions and makes cooping with good people more fun. A good group will discuss their skills and switch to compliment each other, which is part of the fun. The "attribute refund" feature is awesome - you can basically reconfigure your character for a different play style, or to suit party needs.

Tactics matters.

As for myself, one who is not a Star Wars fan but went to see every SW movies, GW's graphic and attention to details is awesome. The best of the screen grabs don't do GW justice. They just can't compare to the in game experience with background music, ambient sounds, mood lighting and other atmospheric effects. When I am alone, I often find myself walking aorund in first person prespective to soak in the scenery - Sometime I wish there are no monsters to fight to interrupt with the sight seeing

I think we will be playing this game for awhile,

KoP

[Zed-F]

I agree that tactics matter. From a PvE perspective it's not a super-tactical game but there are definitely things to do and things to avoid doing. Unfortunately a lot of pubbies seem to have poor senses of tactics. (So what else is new?) Patience is definitely a virtue in some areas and it pays to have a team leader/caller so the whole team is focussed on the same task at once. All too often pick-up-groups (PuG) will fail on account of a single impatient soul taking matters into their own hands and picking a fight that the group is in a poor position to deal with (engaged elsewhere, about to be engaged by a patrol, or drawing too many foes at once.) Strategy is relatively less important in PvE; the main thing there is to know what mobs occupy what zones and bring skills appropriate to the area. Generally in PvE damage-oriented builds fare better than more subtle builds. From a PvP perspective both strategy and tactics are considerably more important, as you might expect.

[WarBlade]

The game (can) gets better when cooping with RBers or other coop friendly folks

And therein lies perhaps one of the biggest, few, and most ironic problems with the game.

Guild Wars is designed in such a way that cooperative teams, with builds that compliment eachother or players who are well synchronized in their tactics, are just short of being almost essential. In the last couple of days I successfully completed both the Elona Reach and Thirsty River ascension missions. In both cases the teams were pretty tight and aligned in their tactics, but also in both cases these two teams were a much needed jackpot after numerous attempts and failures with random teams of poor players of many different types.

"n00bs" are but one part of the problem. There are also abusers, deserters, dissenters and a host of other labels I've read on the screen or might use to describe the various unwanted elements I kept encountering. Pondering the question of why the arguments happen in the first place, it's easy to see how the game design itself is part of the problem.

I can mentally divide the Thirsty River problem groups into 4 basic character types:

Tanks: The warrior like in so many games is the usual front line unit and much of the typical any-game warrior style tends to apply. The funny thing with warriors that some non-warrior players fail to understand is their split reliance on both energy and adrenaline makes the warrior player want to get moving and not stick around long after a fight. Energy is always low and skills are cheap, add energy vampiric weapon upgrades into the mix (AKA energy recovery by damage output) along with adrenaline which needs combat to charge up and hanging around waiting for everyone else to recharge while you slowy lose effectiveness is the last thing a warrior really wants to do.

Nukers: Usually the Elementalist by another name is the old spellcaster philosophy of stand back and blast from a safe distance. I haven't played an "ele" yet, but I'm guessing it amounts to big damage, huge energy pool, long recharge, physical fragility and so on. Nukers always want to stop and recharge the batteries. Standing back and focusing fully on the fiend makes these people one of the more common choices of those who try and direct a fight.

Healers: Keep themselves safe if possible and provide the vast bulk of the group's healing and resurrection needs usuing a moderate energy pool and a relatively quick energy recharge. Two things others seem to fail realizing about the healer is that people need to stay within range to recieve the heals and also the healer will have 70% or so concentration focused on everyone's life bars with the remaining 30% split between the compass and the screen. Two causes of friction right there - more on that in a moment.

Support Fire: Just a general name to describe the remainder who are often found in the middle ground, looking at the screen and doing what they can to add fire support by whatever means to the most appropriate targets of opportunity. The specifics of how are wide and varied, but the results are more or less the same.

So . . .

The tanks go racing off to the next fight:
- Healers get frustrated because the group spreads out and team members outside the agro circle are hard to help. Furthermore they don't watch the screen too closely and get really annoyed when their specifically targeted heal attempt suddenly drags them through an enemy pack.
- Nukers get frustrated because the warrior might charge too deep into enemy territory and wake up an extra enemy pack that nobody has any desire to deal with just yet. They also get frustrated because they might not yet be fully recharged.
- Support Fire's concerns are similar to the Nuker's. Unlike the nuker, who might target and blow the crap out of the largest concentration of foes, the support might suddenly be stretched into a decision about which direct best to support.

The Nukers hang back and take forever to recharge:
- The tanks start spitting nails because their effectiveness is draining away by the second and time is ticking on. Warriors lose adrenaline and necromancers are frequently chomping at the bit while their undead legions are crumbling away before their eyes.
- Half the team starts drawing penises and breasts on the compass.

The healers fail to support:
- The warrior tank up front is practically screaming for help and for whatever reason is not getting it.
- Other players in general might see the healer tapping away at the enemy with a smiting rod and wonder why the hell the healer is doing that instead of "their job".

Support Fire does whatever it is that they do:
- Its kind of funny how some support builds are just never noticed. Rangers seldom seem to get abused because they're not often thought of as having a resposibility, but then again I've had more than one moment playing a warrior wondering if there's any team on my side helping and realizing that if they weren't then I'd be going down much faster. So my conclusion is that some supporters somewhere have recieve a tongue lashing over apparently not helping when in fact they may have been helping a lot.
- My own gripe here: Healers with their attention focused on life bars can't see the shape of the battle very well and they certainly aren't going to be very awake to specific enemies in the field. Healers have downtime between energy or skill timer recharging where they could potentially be lending some assistance and nobody is calling targets. Why oh why the support builds who are geared for focusing on critical weak points don't bother to help in this regard is beyond me. Even if they and sometimes the warriors just double-click what they're currently on would be something.



But it's a bloody good game though.

[Cyrene]

Pretty much “What he said” with regard to WarBlade’s post.

The Thirsty River Mission is a sort of an exit exam on your ability to co-op. It is pretty easy with a coherent group, which, unfortunately, takes a while to find as a PuG. It took me a few tries to find a decent group, and it took us 4 tries to do it (More on how we made it later.) Speaking of Thirsty River Mission and PuG’s—Monks are in short supply for this one (more on THAT later, as well), and anytime I’m on and not up to something else I’m willing to grab Thelonious and help out other RBD folks (hmmm, I guess I ought to get her that WP). Bear in mind, though, that if the rest of the party happens to be clueless all she can do is extend the agony of a dysfunctional party…

A couple of additions from my point of view:

Nukers: That’s pretty much EXACTLY why I like playing them—the ability to watch the battles unfold and pick my targets and watch my team work together (hopefully).

I see about 95% fire in PvE, because the game usually offers up small groups, and those AoE spells are murder on them.

Lightning is good for Spike damage on tough targets, and very popular in PvP. In PvE, the skills aren’t available early, which makes it frustrating to start one, unless you start it fire then swap to lightning later, which isn’t very RP-friendly.

Earth has some wicked skills, but KoP is the only Earth Sorcy I’ve ever seen.

I’ve never seen a Water build. This is another one with a lot of late skills, especially Trident (which is also Elite). I’m still tempted to try one, though…

On Nuker recharge: I can’t really fault them for it, because it took me FOREVER to learn this. All Nukers, repeat after me “I will NOT be Orion.” You know, that friendly Henchman mage with the penchant for blowing a Meteor storm on a Spirit of Winter and then having nothing left but his wand to help out when you hit the tough boss? The guy that casts an expensive AoE on a single target with 5% health left? A lot of AoE nukers have no concept of mana management. If a skill is recharged, they will use it, which leads to delays that piss off the Tanks. There are times when nothing but a mana dump will do, and then folks are just going to have to wait, but if the situation was dire enough to warrant dumping 70 mana points on, then most of THEM should need to rest too. When things are going well, though, I’ve finally learned to lay off once the outcome of an individual encounter is assured so I end the encounter ready to roll on to the next one. Tis one of those slower=faster things. This is another area where the Thirsty Riverl mission hits the Nukers with a Clue by Four (or it SHOULD). You’ve got 2 minutes to take 2 patrols and the priest, and you’re not really helping much if you don’t have skills/mana available when you get to the Priest…

Healers: Yep, party splits totally screw me. Even moderate ones cause problems if I get pulled into the combat zone to keep everyone in range. I can ditch aggro about 95% of the time in 3-4 seconds, but that can be a LONG time for no one to get healed. Not to mention that I’m normally ditching the agro on to a Nuker or a Ranger, which means I’ve dumped the “getting whacked on” problem but created a “have to keep a back line fighter healed” problem. Ideally, I’d just let the numbnut responsible for the issue die, but, with tunnel-vision in the crisis, it’s hard to tell who was at fault. Worse, half the party will go try to save the numbnut, while the other half stays on the original target, and I now am trying to heal TWO groups, which I don’t have the mana for, and for some reason people don’t like to run for it.

I see one other major problem in PuG’s as a healer, as well. Players will see a Player Monk in the group, and decide they are bullet-proof. I call them “Mana Sinks”. If I join a group, and the FIRST thing a Nuker or Ranger or Nec says is “Woot! We got a Monk” I KNOW I am in trouble. Sure enough, at the first encounter, off they go tanking and taking up 75% of my casting time and mana. Now the Tank is ready to roll on because it was an easy fight, and I have to tell him I have to rest, because I used all my mana on Mr. Bullet-Proof, which annoys the Tank. Or worse, the Tank goes ahead and pulls the next group without asking or looking at the text window because he knows I didn’t have to heal HIM and he assumes I’m fine, and starts combat while I have about 3 Mana. A lot of things can happen next, but rest assured that Happiness, Joy, and, Harmony are NOT one of them. This behavior starts appearing at Yaks bend when the party size goes up to 6, peaks in the Lion’s Arch area (where poison and the White Mantle targeting the back line put a strain on healers anyways), then slowly improves from there as players figure it out.

Until the desert. Oh Og. The Desert. There is a reason you can’t get Monks in PuG’s in the Desert. It is because you have driven us insane. This would be the subject for an entirely new post 8-0.

Rangers: Oh yeah, they get to where they are pretty damn useful. I’d seen RBD Rangers that were very effective, but I got new insight on the Thirsty River Mission yesterday. We couldn’t find a Monk (because you have driven us all INSANE), so we went with 1 Tank, 1 Nec, 2 Rangers, and 2 Fire Nukers. No healing at all. There was no room for error, and we made 3 of them, so it took us 4 tries to do it; each time we corrected the previous error and got further. The tactic was just to kill them before they could kill us, and those Rangers could dish it out without wilting under moderate fire, and understood how to dump agro when in trouble. The final run we only took one 2 minute cycle off and got the bonus easily.

In the end, I think we’ll get enough RBD PvE lvl 20’s to have some pretty good runs/fun tuning our skills/roles to each other like the PvPers do.

We’ll also soon have enough experience in the game to start up some experimental group designs (gah we need more character slots).



--Cy



(Ox Ascended and Thelonious lost her mental health in the Desert)

[WarBlade]

Until the desert. Oh Og. The Desert. There is a reason you can’t get Monks in PuG’s in the Desert. It is because you have driven us insane. This would be the subject for an entirely new post 8-0.

w00t! Thanks to sticking with henchmen and a select few known players I must have one of the few sane desert-hopping healer monks around then! Actually, that's not quite true. Somewhat Zen is a Monk/Ranger and the specific description (which should delight the few who remember my style of D2 character builds) in a nutshell is a zen archer. Which brings up another point of consternation among pubby teams: Unexpected playstyles can really irk other when they don't get what you're up to.

In one of the most terrible teams I've seen for Thirsty River, the group refused to acknowledge their death penalties and my lone cries of going back for about three giants and a dozen scorpions fell on deaf ears. The second most terrible 'healing' monk I've ever seen was no help and I was riding at -50% DP (probably for the first time since getting the game - team forced me to rush the priest every time with no support). A -50% DP Warrior has no trouble hitting things for big damage, but with an energy pool at a whopping 10 points any unconventional casting goes up poo creek and I did what anyone would be forced to do: Switched to the alternate smiting rod/focus item weapon setup when I needed it. Given the 4 team corpses on the ground, someone was watching and the result was fairly predictable. "warrior with a wand!!! f****** n00b!!!"

*sigh*

So I can see it now as plain as day. I walk Somewhat Zen into the Thirsty River staging area. The usual 1 to 10 second period of waiting for multiple team up tags to hit me goes by and I visually skim the leaders in the hope of one standing amid some matching capes. I pick one of the teams and barely get a chance to scan the lineup when the countdown starts ticking. We emerge in the level, someone see's the bow and then there's a fairly predictable couple of possibilities lining up in the dialogue box:

1.) "wtf? u heal?"

2.) "mnok with a bow ! n00b!!!!!!"


Colour me apprehensive. 8)

[Cyrene]

LOL, just realized I never answered the OP.

Frankly, I am shocked at the value packed into this game. Even if you never PvP, the content is well worth the purchase price. It doesn't have EQ2-level content and depth, but there is no monthly fee.

And it is simpler, and less annoying (on the whole).

PvE is not rocket science. Playing with henchies, or with a couple of oddball people and henchies can be as technical as D1. Playing with full non-idiot humans is like an unrestricted D2 steamroller, except for special situations and high level areas, where one still needs to watch one's ass 8-).

PvP, from what I have heard and the few times I have seen, is a LOT like L2. If you are focus, you are hosed. The engagement turns on what your team does WHILE you are focused. Others here, including our intrepid leader, have 1000x the experience I have at PvP, so I am probably completely wrong 8-).

Overall, the game is pretty solid. There are a lot of nits I could pick, (LFG interface [oops, there isn't one], targetting options [why can't I select an ally and auto-target whatever he targets?], etc)

There is a lot of room for innovative interlocking skill noodling in the PvE field.

Overall, a fine game by current standards. I second the remark that screenshots don't do justice to the mood of the game in real life + music. The cutscenes are a bit odd....

If you think of it as D2+++, you will be fine. If you are expecting an ultimate breakthrough, you will be disappointed. We kind of accept the nutjob aspects of D2 as an obstacle to be worked around. There a few present here.

Really worth the $50 IMHO.

--Cy