So here are my reasons for why I didn't like GW2. Not saying someone might be completely opposite and have loved these features, but it really gets at what I want in a persistent world nowadays.
- Progression didn't matter: the gating system of leveling in traditional games was / is meant to give you a sense of progression of power. In GW2, this never happens, because you get downleveled or upleveled anywhere you go. You can never go back to the newbie area and one shot mobs because you get turned into a level 5 when zoning in. Immersion wise, it basically implies you can go from killing world dragons to dying to a bunny. It made me not care about getting anywhere in the game, so I.. didn't. Any MMO I play basically needs to give me a reason to keep playing... (con't)
- Personal character combat and playstyles were dull: I tried a bunch of classes up to at least level 10 - the warrior, guardian, engineer, necromancer, thief, and elementalist. My highest level characters were my guardian on live at level 25 and my beta elementalist at 15. All these classes had the exact same setup: 1 - 3 were damage abiltiies, spam on cd and rarely ever requiring thought. The last 2 were usually 20 - 30 second cds you also used on cd because why not, they are only cooldown restricted. 6 is the heal that you also spam on cd if you aren't at full hp, or if you get it for some other effect... you spam it on cd. 7, 8, and 9 were usually the highest dps abilities you could get, that you spammed on cd. And 10 was an "ultimate" that you would use as a get out of shit card. One ability you don't spam. Yet you would often spam it! If it was an offensive cd, you spammed that shit like it was in style! You never had to stand and cast a spell, you could cast while moving. There were no spell interrupts, so you never had to worry about casting in someones face. The only CC effects were tiny stuns (tbh, long cc is dumb, so this is fine) that didn't have any timing element to them. Without healers or tanks, you basically spammed damage into whatever is nearest you until it died or you died. Some weapons sets on some classes could be "tanky" or "healy" in that the 2 - 5 spells would often be tank or healer centric, and you could get heal / tank 6 - 9 spells, but you could never actually "tank" or "heal" as a role, you were just a shitty damage dealer with tanky / healy utility. So no matter how you sliced the game, you were spamming abilities on cd (maybe if you were microoptimizing your playstyle you would stack debuffs to maximize dps, but in general it was just button spam till things die nonsense). You had a dodge, but because of latency and the horrible animations (honestly, monsters flail around in idle more than they do when swinging) and no delay between animation start and effect firing, you basically just randomly rolled around hoping to avoid something. In GW2 favor, you could usually roll a projectile in flight to immune it, so I found it actually useful versus enemies at range.
- PVP is a spamfest: With everyone being a dps class, nobody have legitimate damage "rotations" or ability priorities, and there never being a tradeoff or choice in how you engage in combat, it becomes a cluster fuck of throwing every ability you have into a pile of bodies, trying to get away, and then doing it all over again. Since synergy was... limited, at best, you would usually only care to beat on the same thing as everyone else hoping some debuff benefited you. With so many arbitrary weapon combos, and pretty much every combo producing a different set of 1 - 5 spells, any one player has way too many raw abilities to memorize from other profession + weapon combos, but that gets into the next point...
- There is absolutely no diversity of choice in how you play: One weapon set per class was, in my playtime, always completely better than every other at some role. A guardian / warrior not using a 2h sword for mobility / damage was dumb, an elementalist without a staff for aoe was bad, etc. The only semblance of choice was when classes with weapon swaps would pick a secondary weapon to supplement their only true primary weapon choice, because they could either pick another weapon to have more faceroll damage ability spam by constantly weapon swapping, or use something tanky / healy in case they get focused and want to tank it / get health back. Also the choice between melee or ranged weapons did matter. But in pretty much every profession, one set would be definitively and mathematically better than everything else, and everyone just goes with that. So all that weapon combo diversity goes out the window since something has to have raw numerical superiority at whatever you are doing, and since that is always trying to zerg damage into something, guess what wins out.
- Groups don't matter and players exist in a vacuum: Monsters scale off how many people are engaging them, so grouping up has no benefit besides getting unique loot per kill. If you don't kill things faster, you aren't getting any benefit, but since xp isn't split, it doesn't really devalue grouping either. It is a completely neutral proposition. Better than Borderlands 2 in that regard! Not better than WoW circa 2004, or freaking Super Mario Bros circa the 80s. More players should have tangible benefits since it is hard to get people to play with you. Without a trinity, or any class synergy (hell, something like affliciton locks and shadow priests having shadow damage dot buffs is synergy that GW2 is severely lacking, sure, almost every class has a debuff it provides on some weapon that buffs everyone else, but it is rarely up, and barely a damage boost, and not coordinated since everything else is already inherently zergy) it feels like a single player game with other people. There can be no really competitive and interesting pvp or pve to me, because I can't get into the lone wolf gameplay of CoD instead of Team Fortress, or Fighting Games instead of coordinated synergetic gameplay like WoW Arena's RMP. I feel like persistent worlds require an aspect of each player being an imcomplete package or else the gameplay becomes boring and playing with friends loses flavor because supporting the weaknesses in others with your strengths makes these games.
- The plot is obfuscated and inconsistent: By level 25 I still have no idea what is going on. I was playing an Asura that hunted down a green armored man that killed some rookies, who was in league with an evil faction of Asura. I then went into a set of forests and caves consisting of friendly unnaturally smart trogg rip-offs and got bored. I had some "epic" quest where I had to open a portal to a ruined city on an island that was overrun by the old dragon the main plot has you kill, but as a storyline the whole thing falls flat for a few reasons - 1. the character I play is personified just enough to make me not feel in the story but not enough for me to see my "character" as an agent in this world. Also, its an MMO, you will never have immersive characters with agency because you are too busy engaging with other people treating your avatar as you. Strangely, SWTOR didn't have this problem, because the story had a consistent goal throughout that I could care about, the scale was sufficiently epic for me to engage with, and it came in discretized chunks where each ending brought new beginnings (just an example, Sith Inquisitor is training -> foundations of feud with Thannaton -> murder plot -> artifact hunt and power acquisition for 10 levels -> betrayal by master and Thanaton -> hunt for more artifacts and power -> kill Thanaton. Each part led into the next, and made me care about going forward, because I always wanted to kill some jerk in the Sith at some point and looked forward to it. The enemy of Guild Wars 2 was never put in my face for me to care about, and he never did anything I could personally want to kill him for, so I just didn't care.
- The streamlined experience makes it flat: Waypoints are completely contrived, and you can just fade in and out anywhere in the world whenever you want. So the world had depth until you find waypoints, and then you are pretty much done. Since almost everything important is on the map, there is no exploration (with rare, honestly well done exceptions like the Lion's Heart cave and a few aerial jumping puzzles) and while some zones are thematically consistent, some are just too big and become a colorful mess of inconsistency.
- There are no long term objectives: In WoW, I started playing and saw Bloodfang Armor - and I wanted it so bad that I played for a year to get it. By the time I finished the set, BC came out, and I wanted gladiator and a netherdrake so I played shaman / rogue with a great player in the first season as a rogue and got gladiator in 2s. Then I wanted to be the best rogue on the server and in 2 seasons was nigh the undisputed best player left on Agamaggan, mainly because Gummi Bears and their entire rank 1 crew left. In Wrath, I wanted to try playing GM, so I did. After that I wanted to try pvping hardcore again, but never could get the players on the shitty server. That pretty much eventually led to me quitting, combined with the reasons WoW fell apart for me. Hey, another blog idea!
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