Guild Wars 2

[Huw the Poo]

Well, I just hope she has her extra-thick wooly knickers on.

I'll strip her down to her undies for the next screenshot so we can check how good they are.

There's a cool event in Wayfarer's Foothills in which you help the Lionguard capture a tower being held by the Sons of Svanir.  After you take the tower you move on to the Svanir camp and they come at you in waves; huge, pitched battle ensues and ends with a Svanir champion emerging for a good old-fashioned boss fight.  I've done it a couple of times because my guardian is superb in groups.  After the fight is over there's a skill challenge nearby that people always do so I usually go and help them too.

My mesmer has a skill called Temporal Curtain which creates a wall of energy in front of you for a few seconds.  It's used to cripple enemies that move through it but allies get a speed buff.  So the other night I was stood at the end of a footbridge in an early Human area and putting it up every time someone was running along the bridge.  Most just ran through and got their speed buff.  Some warily edged around it, obviously having no idea what it was.  Some just stopped and stared until it disappeared.  I love messing with people in MMOs. :D

[Huw the Poo]

I've been keg brawling!  The Norn capital has a big frozen lake upon which two teams fight for kegs of beer, scoring points by bringing them back to their designated ale collector.  You can punch, kick and smash your opponents to grab the kegs from them.  It's a lot of fun, and very funny.  I did quite well:



You can practice against bots too.

[son_of_montfort]

I'm finding it impossible to level when I can only play 5 minutes at a time!

[Tuna]

My son got his ID back.. so their tech support is ok in my book.. bummer side is the person who hacked cleaned out his cash.. oh well...

Tempted to get this, but already bought two copies for my boys.. lol, if I got one too, that would make the tab Guild Wars 2 $180 dollars!...

Oh well.. what price can you place on bonding with your kids? Although I am leaning more towards Xcom pre-order

[Huw the Poo]

Cool, I'm glad to hear the (mostly) happy ending, Tuna.  Cash can always be made again, at least it wasn't gems.

By the way, if I had the opportunity to play GW2 with my kids I'd grab it by the horns. ;)

[Tpek]

My son got his ID back.. so their tech support is ok in my book.. bummer side is the person who hacked cleaned out his cash.. oh well...

Tempted to get this, but already bought two copies for my boys.. lol, if I got one too, that would make the tab Guild Wars 2 $180 dollars!...

Oh well.. what price can you place on bonding with your kids? Although I am leaning more towards Xcom pre-order

You should contact support about it.
They should restore your character and its belongings.

[Huw the Poo]

I think I might shelve GW2 for a while, because I don't want to get too burned out on it.

Also, I've finally identified the elephant in the room.  I like, no, love almost every aspect of the game and it's still my favourite MMORPG.  However, there's one thing that doesn't sit well with me at all: the skills.

Aside from some of the more exotic elites and high tier skills, almost all of them are some combination of conditions and boons.  One of my most-used rotations consists of a bundle of skills that alternately boon myself and condition the enemy, and...that's it.  Hit 1 and your enemy bleeds for a whole second!  Ooohh!  Hit 4 and you gain might for THREE seconds!  Wooooooow!

It's boring, and really uninspired.  Fortunately the more visceral nature of the combat makes up for this to a large degree, but on the whole it's a fucking boring system.  In every other MMORPG I've ever played I've looked forward to unlocking the next skill which will undoubtedly be unique, interesting, and have a good spot in my rotation.  In GW2 I don't even bother to spend skill points because there just aren't any interesting skills to choose from.

Edit: Also, a lot of the skills are clearly designed for PvP and don't work as well in PvE.  Blinding a mob for one second when that mob's hit rate is once every two or three seconds is so close to useless as to be almost hilarious.

[LongBlade]

Also, I've finally identified the elephant in the room. 

This is the most difficult thing to do: identify something that's wrong with a game when you can't figure out exactly what it is.

[Huw the Poo]

Yeah, it took a bit of soul searching and it's not something I can usually figure out in games!  It's a good thing the rest of the game is as good as it is, otherwise this would have been a much more major shortcoming.

[Nefaro]

In that case, I don't recommend you pick up The Secret World.

While it's premise is unique in high-production value MMOs, the individual skills are even less inspired than GW2's.  But at least in TSW, you're given a much larger variety to pick & choose from.

EDIT:  I tried logging in & playing some GW2 last night, but I still can't get into it much.  I think it's the art style or something, but the early level zones are now pretty dead, too, and that makes the whole thing seem kinda hollow. 

It probably doesn't help that they didn't give people enough character slots to create one of each class (without paying out the ass for extras) so there will be even less alt-aholics running around the early zone, too.

[Huw the Poo]

See, to rekindle my enthusiasm I tried playing a completely different class, the necromancer.  And I'm still seeing the same old shit.  With my current weapon combination, this is what I can do:

1. Necrotic Slash.  This is just the basic attack.  Every third hit gives me some life force.
2. Life Siphon.  This is a health leech and the only decent, necromancer-like spell I have.
3. Dark Pact.  This is just an immobilise.  Possibly useful in PvP, very little use in PvE.  I don't mind an immobilise as part of a larger rotation of skills; in Rift, I would have one on my second or third hotbar and use it on the rare occasions that it would help me out.  I was happy with this because it was just an option, instead of one fifth of my whole skill set.
4. Reaper's Touch. Causes vulnerability on foes and regeneration on allies.  Not too bad I suppose.  Vulnerability is practically useless to me when soloing because necros aren't supposed to be relying on raw damage output.  Regen is always welcome, although it won't be often that it will mean the difference between dying and surviving.
5. Spinal Shivers.  Chill your foe and remove three boons.  Almost completely useless.  For a start, mobs don't very often have boons up, and even when they do you can almost ignore them because boons are very often quite useless anyway.  Chilling doesn't interest me in PvE.  Since the main threat from a mob comes from its standard attack, increasing the recharge time of their one or two skills is - I don't want to sound like a broken record here, but - completely useless!

So there you go.  My five skills.  All but one are totally uninteresting, all but one are almost completely useless.

Compare to Rift, where I'll typically have three hotbars full of useful skills, not a single one of them wasted, and giving me plenty of choices and tactical decisions to make in combat.

But Huw! I hear you cry.  What about the utility skills?  Well yeah, I got to the point last night where I could start buying them.  So let's have a look, shall we?

Signet of Spite.  Its passive ability just increases power.  Again, for a necromancer this is completely...can you guess the word?  But don't worry, it has an active ability too - it causes bleeding, blindness, cripple, poison and vulnerability.  Great!  With one small problem...the cooldown is NINETY SECONDS.  I doubt I have to tell anyone here that when ploughing through PvE content in an MMO, 90 seconds is a lifetime.  So on passive it's rubbish, on active I can use it once in a lifetime - against one mob.  Great.  Shall we try another?

Corrupt boon.  This gem poisons yourself, but in exchange it transforms all boons on your opponent into conditions.  Aside from the fact that most boons aren't that great and most conditions aren't that damaging (and some may be of no help to you at all as a necromancer...see vulnerability for example), as I said earlier, mobs rarely have boons applied to them anyway, and certainly none that have any kind of impact on the battle.  Oh, and you get to use this staggeringly amazing spell once every forty seconds.  Jeez.

So.  As I've said before, the rest of GW2 is such an amazingly good game that, thankfully, the skills thing is "just" a major annoyance rather than a deal-breaker.  But as I fight my way through mob after mob, I'm constantly plagued by the memory of Rift and find myself almost wishing I was playing that instead.

[Huw the Poo]

There's going to be a free trial weekend soon, 15-18 November I believe.  I should be getting three invites to hand out, so post if you want one.

I've reserved one already for Bob, unless he doesn't want it. :)

[Huw the Poo]

Yesterday I found myself in the incredibly rare position of actually wanting to buy some gems in the gem store.  So I logged in (after waiting half an hour for ANet to fix the login server) and brought up the gem store interface to take a look.

I didn't buy any.  Here's why.

To begin with, if I'm going to spend actual, real money on RMT I'm going to want to see some long-lasting benefits.  In other words, something with permanance.  That immediately cuts out 90% of the store, because it's awash with XP boosters, black lion keys and various other consumables.  Fine.  So I looked at what was left...for example, clothes.  As with Guild Wars, one of the main ways to progress your character in Guild Wars 2 is through customisation of the avatar.

The selections sucks though.  Most of the clothing section is stuff like sunglasses and hats which I wouldn't want anyway because I don't like anachronistic content in games.  Besides, you can only wear that stuff as part of your town outfit anyway.  Why anyone would spend money on this stuff is beyond me.  So that leaves only the armour skins, including one (Krytan armour) that is suited to my new ranger and looks particularly good.

H O W E V E R.  Armour skins are literally that - decals that you apply to existing armour.  So nobody below level 80 is ever going to want to buy these because as soon as you upgrade your armour, the skin is gone and you'll need to buy it all over again.  WTF?  ANet are seriously shooting themselves in the foot here in my opinion.  They lost a sale (of gems).  I have five characters and I probably would've been willing to buy an armour skin for each one eventually, but I'll never get them all to level 80 so if I do it at all, it'll probably be just once.

I'm really disappointed.  Considering the gem store is ANet's only revenue stream after the initial box sale, you'd think they'd be cramming it with new stuff all the time, and coming up with lots of ways to get people to buy gems, but in reality the store is pretty bare and totally underwhelming.  Oh well...their loss.

P.S. I briefly considered buying a new character slot, but they cost 800 gems per slot.  800 is the fewest number of gems you can buy at a time, and it costs £8.50.  Haha...no.

[son_of_montfort]

A long time ago, I bought some gems to get a special key to open one of those lion's head chests. It was not really worth it, but I got several keys out of it. Unfortunately, I did not have a lot of time to play GW2 when it released and I just have not gotten back to it since.

[Tpek]

I find that there's little worthwhile to spend real money on the game aside from extra character slots and increased bank/inventory size (and these would only be useful to certain type of players anyway).