Guild Wars 2 | Superior Realities

Guild Wars 2 is arguably the most hyped MMO since World of Warcraft. People treat it like the Second Coming of Jesus, and even I started to drink the Kool Aid, so when the Curse Network started handing out keys for the final beta weekend, I was on them like stink on a monkey.

I’ve spent the last two days playing Guild Wars 2 at every available opportunity, and now I’m ready to share my views on this massively messianic game.

Where it delivered:

Firstly, Guild Wars 2 is the first MMO I’ve played that is not a clone of World of Warcraft. While there are still some similarities to the juggernaut of the genre, GW2 is clearly its own beast.

The first thing you’ll notice is the pace. Whereas a standard MMO will make you wade through dozens of fairly dull quests before you ever encounter anything exciting, GW2 throws you into massive battles involving dozens of players and NPCs immediately, and there’s never any real down time.

The hype is true; the whole game is the endgame.

Discounting PvP — which I’ve largely avoided — there are three main ways to play GW2, and they’re cleverly designed to appeal to many different kinds of players.

The first is dynamic events (DEs), which will feel familiar to anyone who’s played Rift. However, Rift’s attempt to shoehorn dynamic events into the WoW formula felt awkward. In GW2, DEs are intended to be the meat of the game, and they are always welcome and always exciting.

I’ve yet to see a lot of creativity or challenge in the design of DEs — though that could come later — but they’re all pretty epic and exciting. They may be mindless clusterfracks, but they’re fun clusterfracks.

Surprisingly, the DEs seem to be still doable — and fun — even when solo, which eliminates one of my biggest concerns for the game.

The second option is the “hearts.” These are NPCs (marked by heart symbols on your map) who will reward you for completing simple tasks. These are somewhat analogous to the quests of standard MMOs, but with several refinements to make the process quicker and less tedious.

The hearts aren’t terribly exciting, but they’re quick to complete and provide a good excuse to explore the countryside and hopefully find some DEs along the way. DEs often count toward the completion of a nearby heart, so you can kill two birds with one stone.

The final progression path is your personal story, a sort of hybridization of the usual MMO quest design and a single player RPG. This is what soloists and lore fans will gravitate towards.

DEs and hearts are the ultimate in MMO design. Because there’s no concept of tapping kills, anyone can participate without grouping, and there is absolutely no competition between players.

I can’t overstate what a quantum leap forward this is. People actually help each other — without being asked. Having other people around while adventuring is welcome, not a hindrance. It creates a wonderful sense of camaraderie between players.

DEs/hearts are also the best example of sandbox game design I’ve ever seen. They deliver a wonderful feeling of being a true itinerant adventurer. There’s no hand-holding; just pick a direction and walk until you find something to do. And there’s always something to do.

Conversely, the personal story barely feels like playing an MMO at all, and is obviously designed to appeal to those who are not necessarily social or a fan of sandboxes — like me.

They’ve covered all their bases. The game is both linear and a sandbox. Solo-friendly yet the ultimate in social gaming.

They really thought this through.

Outside of the core gameplay, there are other things to praise. The graphics are beautiful and vibrant even on modest settings. The character models are amazing, and while the customization options aren’t quite on par with Aion, they’re nonetheless very impressive.

I particularly enjoyed the ability to customize your gear colours right out of the gate and change them at any time. I’m embarrassed to think of how much time I spent just playing with the dyes.

There are many other bells and whistles that make the game come alive, but for the sake of saving space, I’ll let you discover them on your own.

Where it didn’t:

But as impressive as Guild Wars 2 is, it is not perfect. Its flaws are few, but they are major.

My biggest complaint so far is the class design.

You only have five offensive abilities at any given time. One of these is always an auto-attack, and two or three are usually more along the lines of situational utility, so you often find yourself spamming only one or two buttons. To make matters worse, all abilities are on lengthy cooldowns, so you tend to just stand there and auto-attack, especially early on.

For such a progressive game, I’m very surprised it kept auto-attack at all. I’m even more surprised they made it central to every single class — even casters. With so few abilities to begin with, GW2 could have really benefited from an auto-attack free combat system like that of Star Wars: The Old Republic.

Environmental weapons and the synergies between different class abilities do break the monotony somewhat, but the fact remains that the simplest World of Warcraft rotation is still far more involved than the most complex GW2 “rotation,” and the classes ultimately feel dull and unfinished.

The other major annoyance was the load screens. As you may recall, I despise load screens in MMOs. They ruin the feeling of being in a complete virtual world.

Unfortunately, ArenaNet saw fit to clog their game with a different load screen for every map, and it gets old fast, especially if you’re going through the many instances of your personal story.

The maps are ~~pretty big~~ enormous, so it’s not as bad as it could be, but frequent load screens are a cardinal sin of MMOs in my mind.

Other complaints include the super-sized interface, the bland music, and the lack of tutorials or explanation. While I’m managing, an inexperienced gamer would likely feel very overwhelmed by Guild Wars 2.

Not the Second Coming, but close:

There are lots of other things I could talk about, but this post has grown to massive size already. In the end, GW2 is not the perfect masterpiece people make it out to be. The class design, in particular, is very hard to swallow.

But that said, I still feel confident in saying that this is probably the best and most original massively multiplayer game since World of Warcraft. It’s a totally unique and very fun experience, brimming with life and energy, and I highly recommend it.

Where the hell am I going to find the time to play Guild Wars and Mists of Pandaria?

Of course, after I write a very long and detailed post, some major MMO news comes out.

Commence fanboy/fangirl flailing in 3, 2…

The monk issue:

I’ll preface this post by saying that I am speaking from the perspective of a PvE player, so a lot of what I’m about to say doesn’t necessarily apply to player versus player.

Before the expansion’s announcement, one of the things I most wanted to see from World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria was a new class.

My wish was fulfilled with news of the monk, but right away, I had a nagging issue in the back of my mind. They seemed very similar to rogues. Rogues are an agile, highly mobile melee class using leather armor, and monks are… an agile, highly mobile melee class using leather armor. Rogues even have a lot of martial arts flavour with abilities like kick and kidney shot.

Still, there were some very unique things about monks. They had no auto-attack at all, while rogues are highly dependent on auto-attacks and getting more so all the time. They also had a unique resource mechanic; like rogues, they used energy to build points to spend on finishers, but they had to balance two kinds of points — light and dark force.

Then beta rolled around, and both those things were scrapped. The differences between the new chi resource and combo points are now very subtle: chi stacks on the player instead of the target, and you don’t need to exhaust your chi to use each finisher. In other words, it’s combo points, but better.

I gained the chance to play a monk myself on beta, and the similarities just kept racking up. This is especially true of the monk DPS spec, windwalker. Just compare the rotations.

Thanks to spec homogenization, rogue rotations all look pretty much like this in Mists of Pandaria:

Sinister strike/backstab/mutilate to build combo points.
Keep rupture or revealing strike on your target.
Keep slice and dice on yourself.
Spend excess combo points on eviscerate or envenom.

The windwalker rotation looks like this:

Jab to build chi.
Keep rising sun kick on your target.
Keep tiger power on yourself.
Spend remaining chi on blackout kick.

Obviously, I’m oversimplifying things. It has been pointed out to me that the windwalker play style is about managing chi, whereas the rogue play style is about managing energy. Windwalkers are also hitting fists of fury on cooldown (although it’s suspiciously similar to a rogue’s killing spree in many ways), and there are combo breaker procs.

Still, I find that playing a windwalker feels extremely like playing a rogue. Brewmaster spec — which is hella fun, by the way — is a bit more unique, but even so, I can’t escape the feeling that this is how my rogue would play if she got the ability to tank.

Mistweaver is the only truly unique-feeling spec. Some of this is due to how far different from playing a rogue healing is in general, and — credit where credit is due — part of this is just due to mistweaver being a very unique spec in general.

Unless you’re melee healing, and then it’s pretty much like windwalker spec.

So the play style and feel of monks is, on average, very similar to rogues. But there are still some very big differences. Monks can tank and heal, but rogues cannot. Monks are more mobile than rogues, and their resource mechanics are smoother and more intuitive. They also have better utility and are generally of more benefit to a group, even in windwalker spec. Monks have much better and more impressive spell effects and animations.

Do you see the commonality between all these differences between the two classes?

They’re all ways in which monks are better than rogues.

Of course, there is stealth. That remains the one trump card rogues have over monks. But stealth is pretty much a non-issue outside of player versus player. The (horribly designed) stealth talent tier in Mists of Pandaria does encourage (see: force) rogues to open from stealth more often, but you’re still going to spend the vast, vast majority of your time out of stealth in any PvE situation.

So the question becomes…

Why play a rogue at all?

I’m not someone who spends a lot of time worrying about what other classes can do. Holy paladins were borderline crippled in regards to mutli-target healing compared to other healers for most of Cataclysm, but while I’d be lying if I said it didn’t bother me at all, I never really let it get to me. Certainly not to the point where I’d do a blog about it.

Likewise, I don’t overly concern myself with balance. Again using my paladin as an example, I’m told holy has been nerfed to the ground on the beta, but while I’m certainly not happy, I’m not greatly upset either. They’ll make sure we’re viable, and that’s all that matters.

But monks and rogues have become so similar that it’s impossible not to compare them. I would even go so far as to argue they are more similar than any two classes in the game’s history — discounting feral druids, as they were specifically intended to ape the mechanics of other classes.

And once you start making that comparison, rogues invariably fall short. The monk system of combo points is better. They’re more mobile than rogues. They can fill two roles that rogues can’t. Even as a DPS, they bring far more versatility and group utility.

What can rogues do that monks can’t do better? Tricks of the trade? Big deal. I feel like the only reason to play a rogue in Mists of Pandaria is if you’re too loyal or lazy to level a windwalker.

To be clear, I wouldn’t have an issue with monks being superior in many ways if rogues simply brought a unique or more fun play style to the table. But that isn’t really the case.

I’m not asking for monks to be cut down, though. The problem isn’t how much like rogues they are. Everyone deserves to have a bit of rogue awesomeness. The problem is that rogues have stagnated, and now monks are better rogues than rogues.

If Blizzard is going to implement a class that plays so much like a rogue, they should work on enhancing rogue mechanics to make them feel more unique. Make stealth relevant outside of an arena. Make poisons a more class-defining and interactive feature as opposed to bland passive buffs. Give us some new abilities that make us feel like proper rogues. And for the love of all that’s good and stabby, get our combo points off our targets!

Monks win… at least for now:

Unfortunately, it’s probably too late in the beta for any major changes to be made to either class. I foresee that monks and rogues will become one of the great rivalries of the game — like warlocks and mages — and I very much doubt rogues will always be on the bottom, but for this expansion, monks have clearly won.

A Blood Elf monk using flying serpent kick in the Mists of Pandaria beta So I feel incredibly torn about the monk class. As a Warcraft player, I think it’s a great addition to the game, and I look forward to playing one.

But as a rogue player, I can’t help but feel a little jipped. Blizzard implemented every change that rogues were asking for… in the form of a new class. And now us rogues just feel obsolete.

Superior Realities

Tag Archives: Guild Wars 2

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