noamineo wrote on Oct 14
th, 2016 at 7:24pm:
Really? I've heard that the PvE in the guild-wars Saga was more or less an afterthoguht. That there explorer areas basically involved fighting your way through a maze to get to the next area for better PvP.
The PvE sucks. Jumping puzzles can be interesting. Once you've done a map, the critters are kind of boring to fight. The mobs are just boring. Dungeons were OK but there were not too many, even with different paths through them. The mechanics are just boring.
If you are into PvP, the PvP specific area has it's own gear set, you won't have to grind anything really. If you want to use the gear you've earned in PvE, you'll have to go WvW, which can be fun but it was mostly zerg vs zerg with a bunch of lag if you had all 3 servers trying to take one spot. I've had a lot of fun defending garrison from the other 2 maps but the lag was so bad that you didn't get skills off really, mostly just kind of ran around waiting for your skill to fire off and hopefully you are near someone that needs to be hit. I was in tier 1. Lower tiers can be a ghost town on the maps.
I think they finally got a new map last year and I've read it sucks, I haven't installed the game again. It came with the expansion and I'm not really interested in playing the game anymore. I started a few months after the game released and didn't see a new map until a year after I quit. It was just boring playing the same map, defending the same shit. Servers don't fluctuate in the tiers, it is pretty much how well you have your time zones covered and if you didn't have good coverage, you couldn't compete point wise so you were in lower tiers. I think U.S. prime time is good on the American servers, tier 1 has 24 hour coverage, anything lower and you start having gaps. Points are used to determine the match and the servers didn't usually move between tiers unless a large population moved.
I think Axis of Insurrection, the meta guild I was part of, I was in Onslaught specifically and AoI was a conglomeration of guilds, anyway AoI moved and is now kind of fucking with the points and ranking system and pretty much showing how broken that system was. Not sure if anything is going on now, I liked running with OnS, Mal was a good leader for zerg fighting. The AoI move has pissed off a lot of WvW players because it is fucking with server coverages and some don't want to move into higher tiers. Tier 1, even though was mostly zerg fighting, the players in there were really good and lower tiers didn't quite have the same number of quality players. They have their guilds but not the same extent that tier 1 servers had.
It was fun when I played, about a year, but the PvE really sucks, not enough interesting build variety, dps is pretty much king since you can dodge the PvE shit, most is very well telegraphed so you just have to pick up on what the mobs are going to do and dodge away. The meta was mostly zerker gear in dungeons because of this, no real need for any support. Everyone has their own heal and if you try to bring a healer, you'll get told to fuck off since you are absolutely not needed at all since everyone has their own way of healing themselves. It is pretty much DPS and dodge. The open world maps are just very easy mobs if you are within the level range. The meta boss events are fun until you've done them a few times then you are grinding for whatever you need from those chests. There were web pages that had timers for the bosses also so you could get in your daily chests from them, the rest of the open world was a farm of champions, typically there were several that you timed right and moved around a map with a group and got loot, sometimes ingredients, mostly for gold farming though. One of the nice things about the PvE maps, it didn't matter what server you were on, you could always guest to another server if you have some friends on a different server. WvW is where the actual server matters. Miss a world boss on your server, go to a different one where the timer is within the spawn window. You could only guest to 2 other servers and could change which one you guested to every 24 hours. This was a really good idea for PvE.
The AH used to be taken over periodically by someone trying to make some gold. It wasn't hard to corner specific markets if they needed to.
You don't really have to worry so much about gear, it is mostly skins. The legendary weapons didn't have any better stats than Ascended gear, you could swap out what stat stet you wanted easily, but it was mostly a neat skin. Ascended gear could take a bit to make, probably get fully set in about 6 months and that shouldn't be so difficult a grind. It is time gated. Crafting is very boring and everyone had someone that could craft, you can max a category and swap to a different one anytime, could only have 2 active at any time though, I usually had cooking and swapped around the other one, I always wanted some food stat boost in WvW. To make ascended stuff, you can only craft something to make it, I think there were 3 items you could only make 1 of every 24 hours, so you had to wait a few days before you had enough of something to make the next item up that you needed a few of, wasn't too many but it still took about a week to make enough to make the 1 item you needed to make that piece of gear. Getting the mats was the most consuming, I think I usually deconstructed the junk from the champion boxes to get the mats I needed and it needed to be the higher level gear I had to decon. The crafting time gate was just stupid though, the stat increase from exotic to ascended isn't very much, everyone could make the stuff so it wasn't like you sold it on the AH, just the base mats made you money, so the time gate was just very artificial and only there for those bitching about not having some kind of grind.