Guild Wars 2: Here Comes the Gear Grind

One of the things that I've really grown tired of as far as MMORPG gameplay conventions go is the gear grind. Your character hits max level, and it's time to smack around particularly powerful monsters again and again until you finally shake out that extra fancy piece of equipment that you've wanted for your character. Mission accomplished, Wizzy the Wizard is now +11 more intellect than she was this morning. All it took was killing the same boss 47 times before that Staff of the Undead Muffin Master finally dropped. By the way, is now a bad time to tell you that a new batch of dungeons is going live in three weeks with all new weapons and armor, rendering all of your current gear obsolete? Yeah, sorry about that!

The whole process quickly becomes an exercise in tedium, as players run the same dungeons over and over again to get all of the gear that they want. Much of the time it's not even that it's a challenge. After ten or so trips through these places, most of the people know the fights, and are just in it for the loot. Up until now Guild Wars 2 has been able to avoid this, and Arena.Net talked up how the game was not going to be grindy, but now it looks like this is going to change with the addition of ascended gear.

It's been a way of getting players to keep playing a game by keeping a carrot with slightly better stats dangling in front of them, but the whole gear treadmill is getting tired. Sure, games need a way to keep certain subsets of their player base happy, usually those who plowed to level cap and are thinking, "What now?" but I'd hoped that maybe Arena.Net would at least try and do something different instead of the same old same old.

I'm not entirely sure what would be a good alternative to a gear grind, but it's not something I'm looking forward to in Guild Wars 2. In fact, I don't even see myself participating in it. I'll be taking my characters to level cap at my own pace, explore the world to my heart's content, maybe craft some stuff, and that will be that. I find myself gravitating back towards single-player RPGs of late if only because they have one feature that trumps anything an MMO can throw at you: a pause button. Seeing one of the few MMORPGs I've enjoyed of late tapping into one of my least liked facets of that genre is actually turning me away from the game, and it's a shame.

Guild Wars 2: Time for an Elementalist

'Tis my elementalist.  She's rather easy on the eyes. ^_^

During my time with Guild Wars 2 I've mostly played characters that use the conventional weapons of fantasy gaming warfare. I've played a ranger who uses bows and arrows, and an engineer who burns and / or blows things up. However, I've not bothered with magic users yet so I've decided to do something about that and have went and made myself an elementalist. Now I'm setting off to burn, freeze, electrocute, and crush my way to a better tomorrow with her.

First things first, I rolled a Sylvari this time since I've not tried that race yet. They're a sort of plant people all covered in leaves who live in a really big forest, but I still prefer to look at them as Guild War 2's equivalent to elves. Their behavior is extremely similar to those mythical creatures present in so many other fantasy RPGs. As you can probably tell from looking at my character as well as the one from my last post, I'm quite fond of the color blue. If I can work it into my character I most certainly will.

Fried bandits.  Add some plum sauce for extra flavor!

Anywho, questing time. Like every character in the game, the first little bit of time I spent with my elementalist was in an instanced starting area. In this case, a magical forest called The Dream. This is where Sylvari first gain consciousness before being born into the real world. The place has seen better days, though, because now it's being attacked by something called The Nightmare, so I had to go fight a bunch of its minions, mostly wolf-like things, and a giant tree dragon. It was very straightforward and didn't last very long, which I liked because some of those early areas when you roll a new character run a little too long for my taste.

After finishing this area it was off to the regular game world where I've mostly been hopping around doing random quests. I started out in the area around the Sylvari capital but quickly got bored there, and have since been doing this and that here and there, making use of warp gates to get to other factions' capitals quickly, and do some quests in those parts of the world instead. I've headed to the realm of the Norns, enjoying the frozen mountain tops and viking-like motifs, as well as some quests in the human lands with all of their green, pleasant, rolling hills. I'm quite a bit more partial to those areas of the game world than the other races' areas.

Human zones have a lot of pretty
fields in them.

I've also dabbled a bit with the story quest for my character. These things can be pretty entertaining I've found. Usually I just tune out stories in an MMORPG, but Guild Wars 2 has been doing a decent job of their's to this point. About the only thing I don't like about the one I'm doing now is that it's introducing this big bad called "The Nightmare Court". After playing Kingdom of Amalur, I'm not really in the mood for yet more elven courts at war with each other, with me being dragged into the mess. It's getting very cliched very fast, but I guess game story writers think it sounds cool to have factions with "Court" in their name, so I may be stuck with it for the time being.

Combat with an elementalist is pretty neat. They can shift between four specialized auras: fire, air, water, and earth. The one you have up is the one that will dictate what kind of attacks you will have. This is compounded by the fact that different weapons also have different attacks, so a dagger would have different fire attacks than a stave would, for instance. So far I've only tried the stave, and a combination of scepter and focus (an off-hand weapon). Of the two setups, I much prefer the stave. It's abilities hit way harder than the scepter, and it has one really neat attack when using air aura that causes lightning to arch between multiple nearby targets for quite a bit of damage. It's pretty great for melting enemies while leveling. I'm actually surprised the game starts players off with the scepter, because it's not much fun at low levels, and left a bad taste in my mouth. I'd much rather have had a stave from the get go.

Picturesque!

All in all, I'm liking my elementalist so far. It's a pretty neat class, especially with how it can hop between so many different types of attacks. She's not as survivable as other classes, but I can manage. So far it's been enjoyable the time I've spent leveling her. I'll write more soon on the subject after I've leveled her up a fair bit more.