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Guild Wars 2 Feature Pack – Part 3

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Copyright ArenaNet Source: guildwars2.com
Copyright ArenaNet
Source: guildwars2.com

Guild Wars 2 goes “mega.”

Welcome back! This is the third and final part of our coverage of the Guild Wars 2 Feature Pack, which goes live on the 15th! We’ve covered balance updates, PvP, quality of life upgrades, the new wardrobe feature, and new traits, but this part of the patch figures to be bigger than them all! Responding to the game-wide issue of certain zones and cities being barren and unpopulated, ArenaNet has seen fit to completely overhaul the way servers operate, giving birth to the “Megaserver System.”

How will it work? Well, for starters, it won’t be going entirely into effect on the 15th. It will be a deliberate process, beginning with the Heart of the Mists PvP hub and the maps with the lowest populations, and should be complete by the end of the year. The Megaserver System seeks to provide players with well-populated zones around the clock, that way there’s always someone to play with and the less populated events in the game get done more often. Instead of each server having one main copy of a given map, the Megaserver System will combine all worlds together and only have the number of copies it needs to accommodate the player population in a given map. It will also allow for players who are in the same party or guild to play together more easily, with functions dedicated to ensuring that related players are placed in the same instance of a map or can easily join friends if they’re separated.

But wait! World bosses spawn at different times on each server! How will they be affected? Fear not, players. With the rollout of the Megaserver Systems comes a standardized schedule for the various world bosses, which you can find here. Bosses that previously did not have failure mechanics or timers will be getting them, to ensure that the game remains on schedule. Also, many of the bosses will be tweaked to preserve balance, and this includes abilities, overall difficulty, or even the event chains that lead up to their encounters. Such changes were not detailed in the reveal, but will be available in the release notes next week.

Waypoints, dungeons, and temples will be slightly affected by the new changes as well. For instance, you will no longer be able to tell if a waypoint is actually uncontested until you arrive on the map that it’s in. In the Orr maps, which have many contested waypoints, this figures to be a bit of a hassle. The same goes for the three dungeons that require event chain completion to open: Citadel of Flame, Crucible of Eternity, and The Ruined City of Arah. You will now have to waypoint to Fireheart Rise, Mount Maelstrom, or Cursed Shore, respectively, to find out the status of these dungeons. As for temples, the god statues that normally have cross-map mechanics will no longer function that way, and instead will only be active when the nearest temple becomes contested.

The final aspects of the Megaserver System covered were guilds and World vs. World. Guilds will remain separate for now; they will still be server-specific until the Megaserver System is completely implemented, but once that happens guild members will earn influence towards the same total regardless of their home world. Guilds will still have a hard cap of 500 members and if a guild has chapters on multiple servers, they cannot be combined. World vs. World will remain unchanged for the time being and logically speaking, it’s unlikely to be affected by the Megaserver System at all. ArenaNet is making many ambitious changes here, so it’s nice to see that they’re preserving the identity of Guild Wars 2‘s WvW game mode for the sake of those who have made their legend on the battlefield.

With all of these imminent changes coming to Guild Wars 2, the game will never be the same again! I’m admittedly skeptical about a few things that ArenaNet is trying with this patch, but I’m also greatly excited that a number of issues that have existed since launch are finally getting the proper attention they need. If you’ve never played Guild Wars 2, now would be a great time to jump in; it really is a fantastic MMO during its high points (and it’s on sale for $24.99 until Saturday). They may not get everything right, but I have a strong feeling that ArenaNet knocked this out of the park.

For more information regarding the Guild Wars 2 Feature Pack, click here. For more of our coverage on the Guild Wars 2 Feature Pack, click here (Part 1) and here (Part 2).

Guild Wars 2 – It’s Wintersday!

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Guild Wars 2 is bringing you a White Christmas!

 

Avid MMO gamers will be pleased to know that Guild Wars 2‘s Wintersday events have returned to Tyria! Players can venture to the now snow-covered Lion’s Arch and participate in all kinds of fun activities! Snowball fights, escorting caravans with gifts, battling malfunctioning toys, a bell choir mini-game that is reminiscent of Guitar Hero, and Toypocalypse, where you must protect gifts from angry toys, are all part of this content update. Alongside this content is a boatload of new achievements, along with titles, gift boxes, loot bags, and a whole lot more to satisfy your Christmas spirit. In my estimation, this is the best update to the Guild Wars 2 Living Story since Halloween’s Mad King Returns event.

As someone who missed out on Wintersday last year due to being burnt out from the game (followed by losing my account password), this content is all new to me. While running around Tyria, I’ve instantly felt deprived for missing out on all the fun from a year ago. Unwrapping huge gift boxes in the open world, only to have them explode and release hostile armies of angry toys was certainly a fun surprise, though in the higher level zones this becomes more of a hassle to deal with than it’s really worth; one can simply bypass the boxes, however, so the choice is up to the player. The player vs. player Snowball Mayhem activity features two teams duking it out in a winter wonderland. Players are awarded points for defeating opponents as well as carrying a gift back to their base. Another piece of content that I found entertaining was the new dungeon, where you help Toymaker Tixx keep his workshop under control and operating smoothly. There is much to do this Wintersday, and so ArenaNet has stated that these events will persist for a month, until January 10th. After all the flops that the Living Story has produced since Halloween (namely the entire Tower of Nightmares arc), this is one update that I’m going to miss once it’s gone.

One more update to the game is the release of ascended armor. With ascended weapons and trinkets already in the game, armor will allow players to complete their gear sets and maximize their effectiveness. Naturally, it’s a huge grind to gain all the materials needed to make the armor, and taking a shortcut by buying completed components on the trading post is going to leave a huge hole in your virtual wallet. Unfortunately, not all characters are on an even playing field when it comes to crafting these goodies. While heavy and medium classes have had opportunities to craft items that can also be used on armor in the weaponsmith and huntsman professions, light classes have had no previous method of acquiring the cloth needed to make their armor. My two level-capped characters are both light classes, so it’s an inconvenience for me. However, removing all biases this is something that should have been addressed prior to the release of the update. I’m still going to make at least one set of ascended, it’s just going to take me longer than some of my friends who play warriors and thieves.

As always, this Guild Wars 2 content update is free to download and will do so automatically once you start up the game. Happy hunting!

For more information about Wintersday, click here

Guild Wars 2: Is It Really “Play The Way You Want?”

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Guild Wars 2, developed by MMO savant ArenaNet, released back in August of 2012 and offered enough alternatives to the traditions of the genre that it almost broke the mold. Gone was the “holy trinity” of in-game parties. For those who don’t know, this entailed making sure that your party had at least one tank (someone to draw and maintain the enemy’s attention), one healer (self explanatory), and the rest DPS (damage per second, or damage dealers) characters. Guild Wars 2 set out to allow every class in the game the ability to perform roles in their own three-way setup: damage, support, and control. Allow me to explain the way ArenaNet intended this system to work:

  • Damage is effectively the same as it is in other MMOs. People with a damage setup will oftentimes have gear that improves their power, precision (increases critical hit chance), and critical damage bonus. Sometimes they will also have gear that improves their damage on conditions (i.e. burns, bleeds, torment, and confusion applied to enemies), but this is not necessary.
  • Support is meant to heal, remove conditions from allies, and apply boons (buffs) to them as well. Generally a support character will have stat bonuses to vitality, healing power, boon duration, and toughness, as they are largely defensive characters. Their job is to keep the DPS upright and chip in damage of their own when they have nothing better to do.
  • Control characters are the condition appliers. They will often use skills that effect a wide area in order to both damage and inflict statuses on enemies, namely stun, daze, immobilize, or any other skill that would normally interrupt attacks. These characters will usually have condition damage/duration builds, with bonuses to other stats as needed.

Now, I’m sure ArenaNet meant well when they came up with this system, as based on any given party there are certain merits to each setup. However, the game has wound up being fairly unbalanced and has led many to discover that damage builds are the only viable setup when doing high-level or endgame content, such as dungeons.

Speaking from my own experience, my main character is an elementalist. Elementalists are the resident “jack-of-all-trades” class, because they can do a little bit of everything reasonably well. Changing weapons grants varied skill sets, ranging from high single-target damage to full melee to massive area damage and control. However, they have the lowest health pool of all eight classes, are light armored (meaning they get squished quickly), and have a steep learning curve. Over the course of my time playing the game, I’ve tried different builds. First I went with a full offensive build, known within the community as a “glass cannon” setup. I put everything into maximizing my damage. However, as I still wasn’t very good at avoidance and such, I died a lot… to the point that I changed it up. I kept all my gear the way it was, which was for the most part offensive, but instead put my traits into defense. I had more health, better toughness, and could stay alive longer. However, my damage effectively cratered, as I was down 300 points in power and precision, and I even noticed that my group heals were still inadequate. That’s when I realized that the best builds are the offensive ones.

This is not to say that you can’t succeed playing some other way. Open world content and player vs. player are still there for those who prefer more balance or full support, but against the toughest of monsters, one needs only to remember the following: a dead enemy does no damage. The quickest method for ending the threat of getting killed by a boss is to kill it first. While you can mitigate the damage and keep removing conditions all you want with support builds, it’s only going to take you that much longer to eliminate the target, and more time defending means a greater chance of a mistake or having to wait for your heals to cool down. Is the hardest content still doable with a non-glass cannon setup? Sure, given enough skill and tenacity.

ArenaNet pounded the “play the way you want” mantra into everyone’s heads leading up to the release of Guild Wars 2. Over a year after its release, the verdict I give is that their statement is partially true. If you’re simply trying to complete the content at hand with no regard to time spent or loot gained over time, then yes, you can certainly play the way you want. However, if you’re a hardcore gamer who wants to maximize the potential of your character, well, you’re going to have to play the way the game rewards most and deal with it.

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