The second profession I tried in the first Guild Wars 2 beta weekend event (BWE1) was a human warrior. I think it’s important to point out the use of the word profession rather than class. Unlike most other MMOs, each profession in Guild Wars 2 actually plays is several different classes, depending on what weapons are equipped. The warrior was my first real taste of how dramatic this difference can be.

I leveled this character up to level 15 in the time I spent with it. My play time on this character was spent mostly in PvE – I completed all 20 levels of the personal story available during the BWE – with only about 10% of my time in WvW.

In the interested of full disclosure, I should point out that I was coming to this character directly after playing a norn guardian up to level 24, and that I have traditionally played a “tank” class. Also, I have a long history of being a skilled “kiter”, going all the way back to games I played in the early 1990s. I mention this because those facts have undoubtedly affected my impressions and opinions.

My first impression of the warrior was that they are fragile. Even with heavy armor and one of the largest hitpoint pools in the game, I quickly had to modify my playstyle from the guardian’s “scream and leap”, to a more cautious “fighting around the fringes” style. It may have simply been due to the abrupt change from a high-mitigation character, but the warrior really felt like a fragile DPS profession, and not a heavily armored one. Because of the huge hitpoint total, the biggest self heal was only a 20% heal. Whereas the guardian was quite happy to pop the self heal at less than ½ heaIth and be refilled to nearly full, I found that I had to be much more proactive on the warrior and use the self heal at around 75% health. If I waited until I was at ½ health (or less) to use it, I would often be dead before the 40 second cooldown was up.

As an aside, I found the human areas to be much more generic than the norn zones. The first chapter of my “street rat” human personal story was pretty uninteresting. The people in my story did not seem to be well developed, and felt more like throwaway, background characters. The buddy/love-interest character of Quinn did not seem likable, and I really did not bond to him or his problems at any time. When given the choice, I did choose to save him specifically (as opposed to stopping the bandits from poisoning the water supply), which, after playing a different character, I think was a more difficult path to complete, but only because I felt that the character I was playing would have done that. (Yes, I sometimes role-play. Try not to faint.) But as a player, I really couldn’t have cared less about him. I found the second chapter (the unknown parents storyline) much more interesting, but that may have been because it was steeped in Guild Wars 1 lore, which really catered to my geek interests.

As always, my first task was to unlock all of the various weapon skills and abilities.

The default starter weapon combination is a sword/shield. This really added to the fragile DPS feel of the class. The defensive shield ability on #5 took a long time to unlock, and the long cooldown made it very difficult to use effectively. The offensive shield ability on #4 did not add any real functionality over the sword #2 ability, and is on a much longer cooldown. #3 provided a short duration snare for getting out of melee, but the preponderance of ranged abilities made this almost useless against anything other than a pure melee opponent. The auto-attack was strongest with its initial abilities that apply a bleed, with the finisher being the weakest attack in the chain. As you have probably guessed, I did not enjoy this weapon combination.

The warrior has many weapon choices and combinations and I tried pretty much every possible combination for at least one protracted fight. Rather than list them all (for reasons which will be made clearer), I will point out a few notable abilities that stood out for me. Generally speaking (and surprisingly), melee was not a very good place for a warrior to be.

Mace/sword is a good defensive weapon selection, and is ideal for melee duels or dealing with veteran or champion MOBs. Between the mace #2 and the sword #5 abilities, this combination can “turtle” incredibly well. The various other abilities add daze or stun effects as well, allowing the warrior to almost completely shut down their opponent’s DPS. On the other hand, this really only works against a single opponent, and the DPS output is so low that the player will get bored and wander off before a single fight winds to its inevitable conclusion.

Offhand warhorn provided good support abilities with a group-wide speed boost on #4 and a melee buff/debuff for allies and opponent, respectively. This would be a good choice for a group-oriented support warrior build.

Axes generally focus on AE melee damage and effects. I settled with offhand axe as my primary weapon choice at one point. The whirl finisher in conjunction with a fire effect makes for an amazing combo. Being able to transform from a melee warrior into a mobile, whirling tornado of flame that stacks a half dozen burning effects on an opponent is so much fun that it cannot be understated. I was literally cackling maniacally every time I was able to pull off this move. With a relatively short cooldown, this was probably one of my most favorite warrior experiences, but it was highly dependent on another player putting down a fire field.

Both of the two-handed melee weapons seemed lackluster compared to the guardian’s greatsword. This may have been partly due to my impression that the warrior really didn’t fare too well in a melee fight. Regardless, the 2H options didn’t feel as powerful and the guardian greatsword, and the fragility of the class made any melee fight a dicey proposition.

What was really surprising was how powerful the warrior became with ranged weapons. Despite having access to no fewer than 17 different melee weapons combinations and access to heavy armor, the warrior really excels as a ranged profession.

My first ranged weapon was a rifle. This weapon was ideal for taking down a single target without getting hit at all. This felt very natural, since the warrior seemed so fragile when in close quarters combat. In fact the #5 ability is actually a knockback, and the #2 ability is a snare, allowing the rifle warrior to keep a target at range for much longer than one might expect. The autoattack applies a stacking bleed effect. I was able to win several fights by stacking bleeds on one target and then switching to a second target, letting the bleeds finish them off. The F1 adrenaline ability, if used after the #4 debuff, could remove 40% of an opponent’s health in a single shot. Not to mention that the rifle has an incredibly long range; if a rifleman to opens a fight at maximal range, they can almost always kill an opponent without taking a single hit.

The other ranged weapon usable by warriors is the longbow. Where the rifle was a strong single target device, the longbow excels at area-effect damage and combo effects. In the hands of a skilled player, the longbow is devastating. Using the F1 ability to lay down a fire field, then following it with the #5 snare (to keep the target in the fire area), the #4 blast (to spread the fire around to even more opponents), or the #1 autoattack (to add two additional burning stacks to your target), can be incredibly effective. The #2 ability provides additional burning effects to a single target, and the #3 can be used to ignite either multiple targets (at range) or two or three stacks of burning to a single target (up close). If a warrior is traited/runed/equipped to maximize condition damage, the multitude of short-duration high-DPS burn effects will likely be extremely painful to entire groups of enemies. The drawback to the longbow is the range; the longbow only has ¾ of the range of the rifle.

Once I tried them, it didn’t take very long for me to completely abandon melee weapons in favor of the ranged options.

I chose the Healing Signet as my self-heal. This signet grants a passive hitpoint regeneration, and a fairly strong heal when activated. I think the longer cooldown was (mostly) offset by the passive regen, but once I switched to ranged weapons I almost never needed this. Even a slow backpedal (after applying a ranged snare) kept me out of melee range and dodging most ranged attacks was fairly easy.

Since I only made it to level 15, I only unlocked two utility slots. And since I more-or-less completely altered my playstyle about halfway through the session (switching from melee DPS to ranged DPS) I did not make good utility skill selections. My initial choice was to choose the passive Signet of Might to increase my DPS output. While this may have been a decent selection in the end, I did not feel that it added much (the majority of my damage was condition based). A few amber pebbles mounted in my equipment seemed to have a larger effect than this signet. My second utility skill was Endure Pain, allowing me several seconds of immunity. Again, this was based on a melee setup, and once I changed to ranged, I never used this.

I ended up favoring longbow over rifle, so I traited into the Tactics line with the intent of taking either the Stronger Bowstrings ability, or the Burning Arrows ability. However, as noted, since I only made it to level 15, I wasn’t able to get that far, so I don’t know if that would have been a good choice. I think that the Arms line would be better suited (for the passive condition damage increase) but none of the trait abilities really add much for a bow warrior. They add a lot for the rifleman, but rifle lacks the heavy condition damage of the bow.

Overall, I found the warrior to be a surprisingly poor melee profession, but an amazing ranged profession. While this is not generally my playstyle, I think that players who tend to enjoy a long range style of play will be ideally matched with the warrior. Both rifle and longbow have amazing utility in both PvE and WvW. In PvE, the combination of abilities allow the player to drop MOBs of much higher level with no worries of ever getting hit. In WvW, the rifle shines in attacking control points and blasting defenders on the walls, and the longbow is amazing for defending a control point when opponents are forced to ball up at the gates.

For reference, my final spec can be found HERE.

A couple weeks ago, Guild Wars 2 had their first beta weekend event (BWE). During that time, I pretty much immersed in the game. I played a norn guardian up to level 23, a human warrior up to 15, a char engineer to 9 and finally, a human ranger up to level 24. I also dabbled in crafting (up to around 125 skill points). My time was about 50/50 PvE and WvW (aka DAoC style RvR).

I found that each class plays VERY differently. Within a single class, the different weapon choices really complement a specific playstyle. While it can sometimes be subtle, the different weapon choices really differentiate even a single class. There didn't seem to be a "best" weapon choice for any class, only a "best for me" choice. For me, I knew I had found the right weapon selection when I started using all 5 weapons skills consistently, rather than hitting 2 or 3 all the time and the others only occasionally.

Historically, I've favored tank type classes in MMOs, so that undoubtedly colors my experiences. Today, I’d like to talk a bit about the guardian class.

I created a norn guardian for my very first character. During play, I found the guardian to be an extremely robust character, able to take quite a beating before falling down. In fact, during play, I was often completing “hearts” three or four level higher than my character, and leaping into battle with bunches of up to four or five enemies without any concern. It does have a comparatively small hitpoint pool, which makes it seem less powerful than other classes, but it had much more durability.

My first task was to unlock all of the weapon skills for all the different weapons.

The default starter weapon combination is a mace/shield. This is a great choice for a player who wants a traditional “tanky” character. The primary auto-attack chain provides a small self-heal on every third hit, increasing the durability of the guardian. It gives a (very small) point-blank area-effect heal-over-time on #2, and a finisher on #3 that not only provides a 33% damage reduction, it turns the #2 field into a wide area group heal. Between the auto-attack heal and the #2 heal, the guardian's hitpoint pool is actually quite a bit larger than you might think. #4 and #5 on shield are primarily utility skills. With the (existing) overabundance of ranged classes, #5 is especially powerful in a large WvW fight. The disadvantage is that this weapon combination is pretty low on the DPS scale, making even easy fights take a very long time to play out. I pretty much abandoned this combination as soon as I unlocked others (around level 6). In retrospect I should have gone back and tried it again after gaining some experience with the game.

A lot of people found the hammer to be a lot of fun. I am not one of them. Perhaps it was because I did not take the time to learn it properly, but I found the #4 ability to be a detriment more often than not. I've never been able to understand why people flock to a knockback on a primarily melee class - when you hit things with a giant piece of metal, the last thing you want to do is punt them further away! There were several times over the weekend when other players would indiscriminately use a knockback and negatively impact their own play – sometimes they would punt an opponent away from other players, making it harder to kill; other times they would push a nearly-dead opponent out of the fight, allowing them to heal and/or escape completely. I barely touched this weapon outside of unlocking the skills.

Mainhand sword has an auto-attack chain that ends with a cone AE on the third swing, which made aggro management a bit difficult. The #2 “leap” skill was a bit confusing to me, since it was functionally the same as the Greatsword #4 ability. Why would the same ability be #2 on one weapon and #4 on a different one? The sword’s #3 ability also seemed to mirror one of the shield skills. I unlocked sword in combination with the torch. The torch abilities seemed very situational and more intended for a support character. Similar to the prior weapons, I did not use this combination beyond unlocking the skills.

Like many others, I settled on a 2H sword as my weapon of choice. The auto-attack chain provides a small buff that increases the chance of a critical hit. This makes greatsword a great choice for guardians who simply want to cause others pain. The #4 leap skill offers fantastic mobility. Plus, when combined with the #2 and #3 skills, it can take out a ball of opponents very quickly: leap in, set a mark, then spin to set everything around you on fire! Plus as opponents invariably target you, the retribution reflects their own damage back to them. When fighting a solo (player or MOB), the #5 (which can chain off #2 for additional burning/retirbution damage) could be either a long 10-second root (good for burning some self-heal cooldown time) or a very strong pulling tool (or both)! The damage output of the greatsword more than made up for the lack of defense. (Also, my utility skills helped quite a bit, as I’ll discuss later.)

The biggest downfall to the Guardian was the real lack of ranged options.

Staff was too short range for me to think of it as ranged. The primary attack ability only has a range of 600, only four times normal melee range. It ended up with more of a "magical melee" feel to me. Plus, the staff skills basically turn the class into a well-armored support character. I'm thinking that players accustomed to playing a healer will probably gravitate towards this since it plays more like a classic mid-line healer than a melee class. I beleive that the staff guardian is probably the strongest "heal others" class in the game, even more than a water elementalist. I could see a staff guardian choosing more support-oriented utility skills and really getting a lot of mileage out of the staff, particularly the #4 ability in a WvW keep fight. But I’m not that kind of player.

Scepter was pretty much the only ranged option. The auto-attack range was the same as most ranged classes attacks and while it certainly wasn't notable damage, it wasn’t ignorable either. I was able to kill a few Wilsons (running players) in WvW with this. The combination of the #3 and #2 skills is pretty powerful too, and I found myself watching these cooldowns often. Because of the way they interact, it was always a strategic decision to pop the AE damage and hope the enemy didn't move out of the circle, or hold it for a bit longer and root them down first, to ensure they took the full brunt of the damage. The root had the obvious utility uses as well, making it an even trickier balancing act. I unlocked scepter with a focus. I found #4 to be very powerful in a large fight (like WvW) but required careful positioning to use effectively. The long cooldown on this made it hard to use, since it was so positioning dependant. #5 seemed to be too situational, like a seldom used, get-out-of-jail ability. Having said that, I still feel that focus is the best offhand for a DPS oriented guardian.

The #6 skill healing breeze was extremely powerful. Much more so that the #6 skill on any other class I played. I think that it is partly due to the small hitpoint pool, but the self-heal on the guardian seemed to be practically a 50% heal. It also allowed me to heal others around me. Definitely not as a dedicated healer, but it certainly did help to supplement their self-heals. The default heal was extremely lackluster with a very short duration block. If the block were longer it might have some utility for a melee-oriented guardian. The healing signet option only healed for a tiny bit more than healing breeze, and did not heal others, making it a non-starter for anything other than solo play - which never happens. Even when you are “solo” there are other players around that will be affected by the healing breeze.

For utility skills, I chose Shield of the Avenger, Signet of Judgment, and Retreat!

Shield of the Avenger made me even more "tanky" as it would block about 20% of the incoming damage I would have normally taken, and was especially powerful in WvW. I didn't understand how the followup skill worked until much later, so I probably did not use this to its full effectiveness. Regardless, this ability was almost always on cooldown for me.

Signet of Judgment was a great passive making me even more durable. I did not ever use the active skill, but this was mostly because I was still trying to learn the class. I expect that if I had internalized this ability earlier in my play session, I would have made better use of it. But I didn’t.

Retreat! was an incredible skill that I used both offensively as a gap closer and defensively as an exit skill. This made the class more like a traditional "tank", since it allowed me to better control the fight. With two other people playing in the same room as me, I was able to call an exit from the fight, pop this and all three of us could escape safely (even from overwhelming odds, most of the time). In retrospect, I would probably choose this as my first utility skill. The only downside to this skill was the icon has a dark area that looks EXACTLY like the cooldown timer. Often I would think it was up when it wasn’t, or think it was on cooldown when it was ready.

I did not use my class specific abilities a single time over the entire play session. The passive effects are decent, and the active abilities didn't seem to make up for the loss of the passives. For example, the F1 passive is to burn my foe every fifth swing. The active ability is to make my entire group burn their foe(s), but then the passive is disabled for 30 seconds. The problem is that if I am attacking continually, I am going to attack many more times in 30 seconds, burning more foes by myself, than my group can do in a single attack. Thus the active becomes less worthwhile (outside of very specific burst damage situations). I found this to be generally true of all three of the guardian's class abilities.

Overall, I found the guardian to be a very fun class to play that complimented my personal playstyle while allowing for a great amount of flexibility. Players of traditional Tanks and traditional Healers would both probably enjoy the guardian. Since this was my first character, and I was still learning the GW2 character systems. I did not trait it at all. For reference, my final (untraited) spec can be found HERE.

I’ll admit it. Guild Wars 2 may not be the game for everyone. As the past beta weekend showed, with all of its attendant NDA breaches, some people really didn’t like Guild Wars 2. With good reason. Some people simply aren’t going to like it. Here’s why:

There aren’t any quests.
Well, that’s not entirely true. There is exactly ONE quest that every character gets, their so-called “personal story”. Other than that, there are no quests that give the player direction on where to go. Instead, the player is thrust into an organic world with dynamic events that just spring up around them. Without the giant green exclamation point quest givers, walls of needless flavortext and quest tracker summaries, how is the payer supposed to know where to go and what to do? There is no mechanic that directs the player to grind out XP gathering 15 rat tails, shows them where a cave is so that they can rescue 5 slaves, or pushes them into the next XP area with a quest to deliver a message to some random NPC in the next town. Instead, the player is left to their own devices.

Players who want quests to help them explore and experience a game are going to HATE Guild Wars 2.

Players are forced to explore the game’s world without being told where to go. Players expected to gain XP by reacting to events that occur in the world around them. There is no NPC that tells you to go kill ten bandits on the hill overlooking the town before they attack. Instead, the bandits actually attack the town while you are standing there. If you fail to defend it, there is a very real chance that the town will cease to exist and it will become a bandit enclave. There is no quest giver that tells the player to go rescue townsfolk that the bandits captured when they took over the town. There is no nearby guard who has a quest to recapture the town from the bandits. All of these things JUST HAPPEN in the game. A player who is expecting definitive directions in the form of a formal quest might not notice or even realize that something is happening in the world around them.

Players aren’t given a bridge quest to the next level-appropriate section of the game. The game does not give the player a clear signal that they are “done” with a given area. In most MMOs the player knows when to move on when they run out of quests in one area and they get a quest that send them down the road to the next quest hub. Instead, the player is forced to decide for themselves whether or not to move on to the next section of the game. Which can be difficult because of…

High-level players are not Gods
Every area of the game has a very specific level range that is appropriate. For example, the very first area that new players spawn into might have a lot of level 1 and level 2 monsters to kill. Guild Wars 2 puts an “effective level” cap on the player in that region. As long as they stay in that newbie area, they will never gain stats higher than a level 2. They actually do gain the levels, but the game will not take those higher stats into account as long as they are in that area, effectively de-leveling them in that region. A high level player can go back to a newbie area and they are effectively limited to a much lower level.

Players who like to feel powerful by attacking dozens of low level monsters and killing them instantly are going to HATE Guild Wars 2.

Players are forced to deal with challenging low-level content even when they hit max level. When the player enters a level 15 area, their stats, equipment, hitpoints and DPS are down-scaled as if they were level 15. Even if they are actually level 80, as long as they are in that area of the game, the game will treat them as if they were level 15. This means that when you find a task or event that is “too hard” at a given level, it is impossible to simply gain a few levels, come back and simply herpaderp through it. The game will downscale the character so that they can NEVER make challenging content “easy”. A low level explorable dungeon that is hard for a level 35 will be just as hard for a level 80, because the level 80 will be “down scaled” to level 35 the instant they step into the dungeon.

Players will never be able to blithely waltz back to a newbie area with their high level characters and completely obliterate low-level content. The game does not allow players to trivialize content that they have outleveled. Which is not to say that character level doesn’t matter. Character level is important because the game does not (generally) “up scale” characters. Low level characters will find play impossible in high level areas. High level characters will find challenging play everywhere. Which will become easier, not as the character levels up, but as the player becomes more skilled. Especially because…

There are no attack rotations
Most players are accustomed to combat being a situation where you use damaging attack skills in a specific order to maximize your effectiveness. If you aren’t familiar with what each ability does, or what effect it has, you spam them as quickly as possible, and then pop them again as soon as the cooldown expires. After all, doing something is better than doing nothing. The dynamic feel of combat is due to the player continually using different attack abilities. They develop “attack rotations” where a specific sequence of attacks, used at a specific time, can be spectacularly effective in a fight. Autoattack (or “white damage”) really not a factor. It is only about 10% of the total damage.

In Guild Wars 2 , auto-attack (or “white”) damage is your most effective attack.

Combat in Guild Wars 2 is not deciding WHICH ability to use as soon as they are off cooldown. Instead, players need to be continually repositioning themselves and thinking WHEN to use their very limited situational attack abilities. Guild Wars 2 weapon attack abilities are specifically designed to be almost completely ineffective when spammed.

To illustrate this, let’s imagine a (fictional) example. Suppose there is an attack skill on a 20 second cooldown that does 100 points of damage when used from the side, but does only 20 points of damage when used from the front. If this ability is used as traditional “spam”, it will do 20 points of damage each time it comes off cooldown every 20 seconds. If the player sits on the ability and waits for a single “side” hit they will do 100 points of damage. The player who holds off on using an ability until the ideal opportunity will out-damage the spammy cooldown hunter by a factor of five. Even if they are sitting on a ‘ready to use’ ability for half the time, and only using it half as often as they could (by chasing cooldowns) they are still going to be putting out 2-1/2 times as much damage as the ability spammer.

This is not too dissimilar to other games. Most games have some situational attack abilities. But in Guild Wars 2 all attack abilities are situational, but some of them are less obvious than the example used here. Like a snare attack that does minimal damage. At first glance this might seem to be a pointless ability that the player would rarely use. That’s actually true. In a normal fight, it really wouldn’t be a standard “go to” attack. But when chasing a fleeing opponent, or when a player needs to extend out of range to heal up or use a potion/expendable item, or simply decide to flee, a snare attack becomes an invaluable resource.

Players can no longer just madly mash buttons and expect “something” to be better than “nothing”. Using abilities in that fashion will actually make them less effective and limit their combat options. Instead players will have to learn which abilities do what, and when it is appropriate to use each one. Combat becomes less about who can quickly push buttons in the right order, and more about who is better at recognizing (and creating!) opportunities where abilities will give them maximal benefit. This will really change the definition of player “skill”. Which shows up in other parts of the game too, because…

You aren’t competing with other players
This one is really hard to get. Dozens of years of MMO play have trained players to hate each other. Let’s use a little quest example to illustrate how much difference this makes. Suppose Susie the Piemaker has a quest to gather apples so she can make a pie. She needs 36 apples, and there is 3 minute event to gather apples from the nearby orchard and bring them back to her.

In a traditional MMO, there are 36 apples to gather. Players must run to the orchard and gather apples as fast as possible to collect them. Every apple that Player A picks up is one that Player B cannot gather. Every player is in direct competition for apples. When the event ends, the player who gathered the most apples is given the “gold” reward, the two second best gatherers get a “silver” reward, the three next best get “bronze” and anyone else who participated gets s consolation prize of some XP and maybe some gold. The competition between players is reinforced because they know that in order to get the “best” reward that have to gather more apples than everyone else.

Or it might be a quest to kill some type of monster. When someone kills one of the monsters, that means there are fewer for other players, forcing them to wait on respawns.

In Guild Wars 2, the rewards work differently than what we are used to. Using the apple gathering as an example, the requirement for a “gold” level reward might be based on a combination of participation time and gathering. For example, the event might be tuned so that if you gathered only one apple (or a very small number) but you were out in the orchard TRYING to gather for the entire event you still get a “gold” level award.

Players who like to feel that they are “better” than other players are going to be disappointed.

Getting the “best” reward doesn’t require the player to be better than the other players in the event, they simply have to meet some minimum criteria. Potentially, every single player could get “gold” rewards with no one getting “silver”, “bronze” or lower awards. This doesn’t mean that the rewards are easy to get. Low level events might be trivial to get gold level every time. But since every player is trying to meet the same requirements, a higher level events might have a higher threshold for success. Just like it is possible for every single player to get a “gold” reward, some events will result with no one getting “gold” and every single participant getting “bronze” (or lower) rewards!

It’s NOT “completely different” gameplay
Players who are expecting Guild Wars 2 to be a complete reboot of the MMO genre are going to be disappointed. While it does have a lot of new gameplay elements, at the very core, it is still an MMO. There are still “kill ten rats” events. There are still “go to town X” tasks. There are still dungeons that have button puzzles, “secret” crafting recipes that will be posted to various websites within hours after release, and button-mashing combat opportunities.

If you are expecting something revolutionary, you will likely be disappointed.

Guild Wars 2 is innovative just like WoW was innovative in 2005. It really isn’t adding anything completely new and revolutionary to the genre. What it is doing is wrapping pretty much everything good from every other MMO, dropping all of the time-sucking pointless parts of it and rolling it into one giant ball of fun gameplay. The sum is a product that feels very fresh and new, but still familiar and easy to pick up. The roughest spots for most players are where the design is mostly what they are used to, but implemented just different enough that their old “bad habits” still work (sort of) and they aren’t willing (or able) to adjust their playstyle to this new paradigm. (Combat is a prime example of this.)

Guild Wars 2 will become the new standard for MMOs. There is no doubt about it. There will be detractors who don’t enjoy it. That’s undeniable. I’ve listed a few reasons why people won’t like the game right here. But for most players of MMOs, Guild Wars 2 is going to be a game that they can play and enjoy for years to come.

By now it should come as no surprise that I'm a fan of Guild Wars 2. When I was first bitten by the bug a couple of months ago, one of the things I started doing was working on the Guild Wars 1 Hall of Monuments. This is a repository of titles, pets and items that new characters will get in Guild Wars 2. The only way to get them is to earn them in Guild Wars 1. There are a total of 50 "points" available, with every single point up to the first 30 granting an item, a title, a pet, or some combination of those.

When I first started, I had 3/50. This was pretty easy, since every player in the game gets three points just for linking their account. It's like the proverbial "first one is free" credit.

It didn't take long to get to 8/50. I had some legacy accounts, so I was able to dedicate 15 miniature statues right away for one point. I bought an in-game item allowing me to put a Hero staue in the hall for a second point. I had already finished the original Prophecies campaign, and that was worth two more points. And finally, I had already set up some end game "elite" armor for my final point.

And there I sat. For about two months. And then came this weekend.

In my past game play, I had completed 15/25 of the Prophecies "bonus" missions. Completing all 25 would give me a title and move me towards another point. So I started working on bonus missions. Luckily, I had a friend who was playing through for the very first time, so I would do missions with him and complete the bonuses that I was missing. The problem was that he was playing on my second account. About halfway through, he decided to buy his own account and restart the game. So I had to work on the bonus missions solo. I managed to finish all of them except for one: Thunderstone Keep. I remembered that this mission was incredibly difficult with a full group, and I needed to do it solo. So I put it off.

I saw (in-game) that I had explored about 70% of Tyria, so I started working on the Cartographer title. Because of the name, I assumed (mistakenly) that I nly needed to explore 90% of the game to get credit. When I passed 92% and still did not have it, I realized that I actually needed 100%. But since I was already, as they say, "invested" in the title, I decided to finish it off. Some of the areas needed are within difficult to get to mission areas, and others required a lot of wall-scrubbing.

A good portion of what I needed was in the Thunderstone Keep mission. So on Friday, I bit the bullet and tried it. It took three attempts, each of which was a good 45 minutes of time investment, but by persevering, I was able to prevail and completed the final bonus, which earned me Protector of Tyria.

As a bonus, i came out of that mission with 98% explored. I finished up the two other small areas I knew were missing and brought it up to 99.8%. Looking around the map, I found a slice in a very early mission that looked fairly easy to get to. A few minutes later, I was awarded Grandmaster Cartographer of Tyria. Two more titles!

In parallel, I was working on the Factions. I had been stuck on the second-to-last mission. I was able to complete it, but for the Protector title, I needed to beat it in 20 minutes or less, which seemed nearly impossible for me. I had tried it a handfull of times and no matter which route I took, or what strategy I used, I was finishing within ten seconds of 24 minutes, four minutes too slow! So I did some soul searching. I spent several hours skill hunting in orer to tweak my build. I took a deep breath and plunged in... and finished in 18 minutes! From there the final mission was a cakewalk. I needed to beat it in 150 seconds for the bonus; it took 45 seconds. Two more titles, added to the three Tyrian ones gave me three more HOM points, for a total of 11.

(It's worth pointing out that my "good enough" goal for HOM was ten points. For ten points, you get the title "Guild Warrior", which seemed oddly appropriate for a game called Guild Wars.)

Following the Factions campaign, I was able to charm a phoenix. I took it to the Zaishen Menagerie and death leveled it with a throwaway PvP character. This involved letting the pet kil me endlessly for about 30 minutes. Eventually, it gained enough XP to become level 20 and could be mounted in the HOM. The phoenix is a rare pet, worth two more HOM points, bringing me up to 13 total!

As a followup, I was only two quests away from completing the War in Kryta storyline. I knew this story would give me a weapon that was worth another two HOM points so I completed that. Sure enough, two more points. But one of the ancilliary rewards is a box that contains a random item. I've gotten these in the past and they invariably give some useless totchke that I would never use in normal play and would end up clogging my inventory until I ineffectively used it in a useless situation, just to get rid of it. Lo and behold, but I pulled out a rare gold miniature! This was worth yet another HOM point!

So in two days I went from 8/50 to 16/50!!

I still need to buy a unique green miniature (another point). I'm 90% done with the Black Moa Chick quest. But I'm told that I can sell the moa for 70k and buy any other green for 30k. The extra money will help towards my armors. And since I'm sitting at 19 minis right now, the green one will also trigger the 20 statue award for an extra 2 points.

I should finish Eye of the North. Once done, I can dedicate two more hero statues for two more points. (I already have the items needed, but I can't access the location until I complete the quest line.)

I still need to finish Nightfall. This won't get me any more HOM points, but it will give me access to the vabbian elite armor crafter.

I should try to get some elite Kurzik armor (another point for that one), some cheap norn armor (another point), some expensive vabbain armor (another point), and another cheap armor (two more points when I have five total).

I need to beg, steal or buy a Destroyer weapon and a toremtor weapon. Each of those is worth a point.

Finally, if there is time, I will buy a Zaishen PvP title. This "only" costs 1.1million in-game gold.

If I manage to get all of this done, I should end up with 31/50 points.

And I'll never play Guild Wars 1 again.

This is the third part of a mulit-part blog post. If you didn’t see the first two parts, they should be right below this one. Or you can click here for the first part, and here for the second part.

It’s worth noting that arenanet has more-or-less confirmed my speculation in a recent dev-blog posting. Even if the specific details are not inlcuded, it looks like the general idea will be in the game. They call them “meta-events”, and they will involve multiple groups defeating multiple local events that combine into a large zone-wide meta-event. In fact, the dev-blog even mentions the centaur invasion event I’m discussing!

One thing that often comes up in this discussion is what happens when the event is “over”. In past games, like WAR, the PQ would simply reset to the initial stage and restart in the same exact area. This felt clunky and unrealistic during play and it certainly wouldn’t make sense to have all of the centaur camps just instantly spring back to life the same second that players killed the centaur War Boss! I think that these events could reset organically, simply by virtue of how they could be implemented.

So how could you build this centaur event that I’ve laid out? It’s actually not too difficult, and mostly uses existing MMO elements. Let’s break it down and see how you can build this thing. (This may get a little technical. I’m going to talk about game design!)

First, think of each centaur camp as its own “event”. There is a static spawn (an existing MMO element)… but let’s not put it in the camp. Instead, put it somewhere not-too-nearby, but not-terribly-far-away. Now when the centaurs spawn, they need to path to the camp. This is easily handled by making them default to be “patrol” MOBs (again, an existing MMO element). The only catch here is that they need to be pathed to patrol only once. This might require a little code change since most “pat” spawners use the actual spawn point as one of the waypoints. In this case, they spawn, move along their patrol, then stop. Of course the end point is going to be in the camp that they are attached to.

This layout means that if the camp is occupied (by players) the remote spawner makes it “appear” that wave after wave of centaurs are attacking. After all, the spawner will continue to spit out MOBs as soon as the prior ones are gone. But if the players all leave – after the event is over, for better or worse – and the camp is unoccupied (by players), the centaurs will continue to attack any NPCs there, eventually kill them and then set up residence in the camp. If the NPCs manage to kill one (or more) of the attacking centaurs, the spawner naturally spits out a couple more until the camp is full. and then the spawner would stop, since its MOBS are still in the game. This allows the centaur camps (with NO active event running) to naturally and organically reset itself.

The only major code changes to make this happen would be the “trigger” for the events. Each event would need to be “active” all the time, but basically “asleep” until a specific condition was met. For most of the camps, the trigger would be that each of the prior events is in the “defeated” state. That is, players have occupied the earlier stages and, as new “patrol” centaurs spawn, they are killing them off. Thus the event chain ends up being essentially a cascade of static events. The other significant code change would be that the later stages of the chain need to be able to instantly “fail” when any of the earlier chained events fail. Essentially this is similar to the “trigger” condition, but in reverse. (This is actually the same code change.)

So if we have things set up like this, let’s look at the “reset” conditions. The event can end in one of two ways: either the players kill the War King (which a pretty easily definable state), or they fail to defeat the War King. The failure condition is harder to define, so we’ll deal with that later.

If the players defeat the war king... nothing happens. The natural triggers for the event will automagically reset it over time. Maybe I’ve grown jaded form playing MMOs for so long, but I strongly suspect that players will not bother to defend NPCs that are being slaughtered unless there is either an active event or they are directed to do so as part of a quest. The remote spawners will just keep spitting out centaurs util the NPCs are killed and each camp goes back to being occupied by enemy MOBs. The only trigger that is a concern is the very first camp, which instigates the chain. If we set the trigger condition for the very first camp to require that ALL of the later stages be occupied by centaurs, the event cannot “reset” until it has naturally put itself into that condition. No special code or game design trickery needed. It just naturally “happens” over time. It’s unpredictable how long the event would take to reset, but it would happen. Eventually.

The other condition is even less clean. This is an open-world event; how do we know when the players have “failed”? It could be a timed event (Kill the War King in 30 minutes) but that always feels unnatural and doesn’t really work within the organic world paradigm. A potential solution that accomplishes the same thing, but “feels” better, is to have a massive spawn that is on a time delay. When the final event kicks off, the timer starts running. If the players take too long, the War King calls up his army (who conveniently spawn on the other side of a hill) and they massacre the players, causing a complete wipe. Those spawns could be set as the same kind of one-shot “patrol” spawns as the earlier camps, with one assigned to each camp.

This causes the centaur army to essentially send a massive wave of attackers back along the chain, causing resets and failures as they fight back. The chain would migrate backwards along it’s conditions, resetting where the players lose, and staying active where they win. Either the players lose completely and the centaurs push the chain all the way back to the initial setup (which is a reset), or the players manage to stop the “failure” wave and start advancing the chain forward at some point (which isn’t really a “reset” but would serve as one). It could end up with a “front line” being established. Where the players are pushing the event one way, the MOBs are pushing the other way and the event chain simply sits at a point of stability, oscillating between to chained camps. Eventually the players will get tired and leave (causing the chain to reset completely) or rally and kill the War King (and cause the chain to reset completely). Either way, it would be fun to be in a continual battle!

Again, much of this is conjecture and guesswork. The start of this discussion (chained DEs) has been already revealed to be factual. And while the actual mechanics of this specific DE chains is mostly guessing, it has been confirmed that large “meta-events” such as what I’ve described are definitely in the game! How different events tie together is only one potential possibility. The actual event chain described is mostly conjecture based on the text on a year-old leaked image, and the final event described here is almost certainly wishful thinking. None of this is based on “privledged” information and I am not involved in the GuildWars2 beta. I respect and adhere to non-disclosure. I am NOT in any way involved in the development of Guild Wars 2, or, for that matter, any game product at all.

This is the second part of a mulit-part blog post. If you didn’t see the first part, it should be right below this one. Or you can click here.

To see how a Dynamic Event (DE) is going to differ from War’s PQs and Rift’s rifts, I’d like to present a develoment image that was leaked on to the web some time ago, and present some speculation on one possible DE “chain”.



I’m going to make some guesses about a chain that runs across the entire map. It’s listed as the “N” chain. This is a very long chain with potentially twenty-eight steps. I’m going to make some very broad brush assumptions based on publicly released information and add in a healthy dose of speculation in order to describe how this system might actually work in the game. Please keep in mind that I am NOT in any way involved in game development, nor am I in the beta. It’s worth noting that I would never be making this post if I were under NDA. It’s also worth noting that the start of this discussion is pretty firmly based in fact, each successive paragraph delves deeper and deeper into conjecture and wishful thinking. I do think that everything I describe here is POSSIBLE and would be relatively easy to implement given the types of development tools that are available. In fact, my next blog post will describe just how simple something like this would be to implement.

Let’s start at the “beginning” of this chain. It’s listed as N1 at Camp 6. But actually, maybe not. We’ve been told that some DEs have pre-requisites in order to start. Similar to the “random” spawns of rifts, DEs are not always on and might have some sort of "trigger" to start. This is an important point and something that should be kept in mind. Regardless, let’s make an assumption here that when the player enters the they are told that enemy centaur have occupied Camp 6 (listed as N1/2 on the map) and the players need to kick them out. The players move forward and kill all of the centaur and destroy their encampment. (This would be the event “N1: Destroy Camp 6”). After a short time delay, a caravan of NPCs moves in and starts building a friendly outpost at Camp 6. At the same time, centaur continue to attack that area from nearby (and maybe not-so-nearby) spawns. If the players are not vigilant in defense, the encroaching centaur population will stop the friendly NPCs from building and, in the extreme case, if the players vacate the area for a while, can actually rebuild the enemy encampment. So the players must stay active on the next part of the chain, N2: Hold Camp 6.

Once the friendly NPCs are established at Camp 6, this acts as a "trigger" for the start of the N3: Destroy Camp 7 event. It's worth noting that up until this point, that event did not exsit in the game world. Until Camp 6 is captured, the players would just see a centaur encampment at Camp 7. There would no active DE in this region. Even though the N3/4 event exists, it would not be active and the players would not be notified. Killing the centaurs here and capturing the camp would not result in a friendly camp being established. The chain requires that prior steps be completed in order to unlock later ones.

Even better, suppose the centaur attacks at Camp 6 don’t just artificially stop because the players captured it. Suppose that the N2 "event" continues indefinitely and the monster attacks continue. If the players abandon Camp 6 after they "win" and run off towards Camp 7, the centaur spawns recapture Camp 6. The event chain would then "reset" and return to its prior state of N1.

Capturing Camp 7 is going to be more difficult because the players must, by necessity, split their forces and attention between protecting Camp 6 (N2) and capturing Camp 7 (N3). Even if each camp is individually very easy to capture – suppose it only takes two to three players working together – by “stacking” the event chain in this manner, the event is going to very naturally and organically ramp up in difficulty. It will get harder without resorting to standard MMO tropes like mini-bosses, increased monster levels, faster spawn rates or silly raid-like “tricks”.

Let’s assume that the players are successful and manage to do this. This would unlock the next event in the chain, “N5: Destroy Camp 8”. Meanwhile, the prior events Hold Camp 6 (N2) and Hold Camp 7 (N4) continue to be active. Let’s continue with our assumption that the players are able to split their forces and successfully capture Camp 8 while keeping both Camps 6 and 7 defended. I would expect that there is some time delay between destroying each centaur encampment and the time it takes the friendly NPCs to arrive/spawn and set up at each camp. The “hold” quests would stay active throughout all of this allowing the players to adjust to the increased difficulty as it ramps up.

Now that the players have successfully captured Camps 6, 7, and 8, the chain splits. They can push on the northern fork and capture Camp 9, or they can go south around the mountain and capture Camp 10. Either of these two events are valid, and completing either one of them will advance the chain.

Keep in mind that centaur spawns are continuing to attack each camp that the players have already captured. If any one of these is lost to the attacking centaurs, the players “fail” the current step and the chain resets back to the camp that was lost. Let’s suppose that, for the sake of the example, that while the players are attempting to capture Camp 9, the players are stretched too thin. It’s getting late on the east coast and some players have been defending Camp 7 for nearly two hours. They are getting bored with the endless cycle of slaughtering waves of centaur, so they log out. With no one defending, the monsters manage to kill the camp’s few NPC guards and start to rebuild their own encampment. The current steps at N4, N6 and N7 automatically fail, and the “current event” listing on the screen of all of the players in Camps 8 and 9 vanishes. Meanwhile, Camp 6 players are told that they need to retake Camp 7.

Some players will assume the event is “over” and leave. Others will use whatever means they have to figure out what happened. Over time (when these chains are better known) players will realize that a prior event in the chain has failed and go back to reclaim that lost stage. Eventually an organized group of players will be able to coordinate these types of chains and keep multiple stages active by assigning different players to different tasks and rotating new people in and out as required. It’s possible that players could potentially capture multiple camps simultaneously and push the chain ahead several steps at once. Keep in mind that we have so far only talked about three parts of an event chain that has TWENTY-EIGHT stages!

Let’s go back to the position where players have captured Camps 6, 7, and 8. They will need to either keep a couple of people in those “back line” positions, or rely on “fresh recruits” – as new people enter the zone, they will automatically find the “hold” events active and hopefully participate. In any case, let’s assume that the players have this figured out and, this time, for some reason, they decide to go south to Camp 10 instead of Camp 9. Once Camp 10 is captured, the actual chain continues on to Camp 11. But what about N11:Centaur Mining? That could be an optional dynamic “side” event that doesn’t advance the event chain, but may offer special rewards. For example, maybe Camp 10 is a forge or refinery that is processing ore and after taking it, the players have an opportunity to attack the adjacent mines. (This part is almost entirely guessing on my part.)

The neat thing about the concept of a “side” DE is that is it only available if the chain is pushed forward to that point, and the correct situation has unfolded. For example, when the players go north to Camp 9, they can still push forward to Camp 11 (without taking Camp 10), but there is no side-event associated with that route and the N11 “side” event is never activated. Until these event chains are better explored, it’s impossible to know which stages have the potential to “unlock” a side quest like this and which ones are the fast, easy way to the final stage of the chain. The “side” events probably will not advance the DE chain, so players who rush off to collect ore at the mining camp (N11) will not be told to progress to the next step of the chain at Camp 11. A similar “side” event might be triggered at farming Camp 11, activating the N14:Stop Harvest event.

So, let’s assess the situation so far. There probably a couple players defending continual centaur spawns at Camp 6, another few defending at Camp 7, several more defending at Camp 8, a handful defending Camp 10, Camp 9 is left under centaur control, a couple of groups went out to mine ore or stop the harvest at N11 and N14, and more players are holding Camp 11. This might ALL be required to unlock the “Destroy the War King” event at N15. It’s likely that this event will involve a very difficult and boss-like event, similar to the undead dragon and pirate ship dynamic events that have been shown at various trade shows.

This one event chain could require over three dozen people actively involved and working towards a common goal! All without any real coordination or formal grouping. This seems very exciting to me. In my next posting, I'll discuss how I think these types of events can conclude in an organic way and how they could be implemented fairly easily.

So it should be obvious by now (based on my last five postings) that I’m pretty excited about Guild Wars 2. In fact, it was this excitement that led me to start posting to my blog again. More specifically, I was motivated by a single question: What is it that you are most looking forward to in Guild Wars 2? I will leave the honest answer to that question for future posting. News is only now just starting to be released on the aspect of that game that I find most intriguing. Instead, I’m going to start posting my short list of features that I’m really looking forward to in the new game.

So, let’s talk a little bit about Dynamic Events.

First I’d like to discuss some of the “dynamic events” we’ve seen in past MMOs. I’m going to ignore player-run and GM-run events in even older games because those were rare things that most people never got to participate in. I was lucky enough to be playing EverQuest one night when a Gnoll “came alive” (ie, a GM was controlling it) and began to RP with me. It was a lot of fun, and in the end I ended up having a two-hour long in-character “discussion” with this Blackburrow Gnoll. But that was one singular event and it happened only to me. It was not part of the game. I’m not going to consider those kind of events.

The first game that I played that had automated dynamic events was WAR. For those that never played that game, it had (and still has, I suppose) an innovation called Public Quests. For example, as you entered one of the low level areas, you might see a burning windmill off in the distance. It looked cool, so you would go there to see what was going on. As you entered the area near the windmill, a new quest would just “pop up” on your screen. You didn’t need to talk to an NPC and click through dialogue or text to accept it, you just entered an area and suddenly you were given this additional task. Something simple usually. Continuing the example of the burning windmill (which is an actual PQ in the game!) the new quest would say “Stage 1: Seeker Horror 0/50”. Mouse over the text and the tooltip would have some flavortext about the Seeker Horrors and how they were evil and blah blah blah. All around you are a bunch of Seeker Horrors just wandering about. So you get to it, and start killing them in droves. When the counter reaches 50/50, the quest changes to “Stage 2: Seeker Cultists 0/16” with a ten minute timer. Suddenly the Seeker Horrors all de-spawn and six Seeker Cultists appear, along with two pets each. These are much more difficult monsters to kill and you are forced to fight three of them at once. Meanwhile the clock is ticking down. There are some other players in the area who were also killing the Horrors, so you team up (without actually forming a group!) and start knocking out the Cultists. It’s tough but, by working together, you manage to kill all six before the timer runs out. The quest then changes to “Stage 3: Baruun the Seeker 0/1; Volkyth Flamecaller 0/1” with another ten minute timer. The Cultists and their pets do not respawn, and two very large Bosses appear at the base of the burning windmill. All of the players charge in to kill them, and several characters are killed almost instantly. These guys are TOUGH!! The flamecaller summons ten Horrors every minute, and Baruun starts spawning Seeker Flamers that do an AoE attack. As luck has it, a high-level character happens to be wandering by and he helps you kill them. The quest is completed well within the ten minute timer.

And then the real treat: the reward. Once the quest is completed, a kind of scoreboard pops up and you can see how much each player contributed towards the different goals. You never formed a group/party/fellowship/whatever with these other people, but the game was tracking your individual contribution towards the goal regardless. It didn’t matter if you tagged each monster first or just wildly flailed about, hitting things that others had already tagged. Killing blows were not counted. But if you were working towards the goal, you got some amount of contribution. The top three players get a really nice special reward, about a quarter level of XP, a decent amount of coin, and a blue or purple item. Everyone else gets some coins, some exp and a white item. The amount of reward is tied to the contribution. So even if you just wandered in during the middle of the PQ and started killing things, you got something.

While this was innovative and new when WAR came out, there are some inherent problems with this system. They are completely static, just like standard monster spawns. If the quest is completed (or failed) it just “resets” back to Stage 1 and the exact same goals are listed. In essence, it becomes a kind of open-world instance that never changes. The location is fixed. The Windmill PQ is always based around the burning windmill. The stages are always the same, and they occur in exactly the same order. This makes each PQ predicatable, boring, and not a lot of fun to repeat. The fatal flaw is that PQs do not scale. If the PQ is designed for 10 level 5 characters, a single level 10 can probably complete it without breaking a sweat. Likewise, if a PQ is meant for 40 level 50 players, it's going to all but impossible with fewer than that number. This leads to PQs being fun the first time you do them in a level-appropriate group of the proper size, and completely useless when you are not in the correct level range, you have a group that is too large or to small and incredibly boring to repeat. 90% of the PQs become trivial or impossible, limiting their appeal. With a limited selection that is even further constrained by level and group size coupled with the lack of replayability, the Public Quest system really couldn’t maintain it’s appeal.

The next iteration of this type of design came with Rift’s… well, rifts. This system was similar to PQs but added some dynamics to the scope. Rather than being fixed in a single place and continually available, rifts would spawn in semi-random locations. The engine would check to make sure that the area had the right number of players of the proper level range and then spawn an appropriate Rift event in that area. Similar to the PQ system, there would be multiple stages to a Rift, with some stages timed. Also similar was the reward system that counted overall contribution even if the player was ungrouped. One of the major changes was that if the players did not “close the rift” by winning the event, the monsters that it spawned could gather forces and attack the NPC towns and villages. There was the possiblity of the local merchants, equipment sellers and even the player’s spawn points being overrun and lost to the AI controlled monsters. This gave the system a feel like the monsters were actually AT WAR with the players. It really felt like the player was under attack by the game at times, and not just a static game world where nothing ever changed.

This solves some of the problems with the original PQ system, but not all of them. The rift locations were still mostly static. Even though they could appear randomly, they always appeared in the same exact spots within a region. If players did nothing, the game would “reset” a rift after one hour, so even if the monsters took over an area, all a solo player had to do was wait a bit and the attackers would magically “go away”. Each rift event followed the exact same cookie-cutter formula: 1. Kill some number of weak monsters; 2. Kill a smaller number of stronger monsters; 3. Kill a single Boss. If the players were fast enough killing the Boss, a “bonus stage” would start: 4. Kill a small number of difficult monsters within a set time; 5. Kill a second Boss within a few minutes. Even by adding some dynamicism to the system, the real killer of the rift system was that it was still far too static. After playing through them, all of the rift events really felt the same and become monotonous. It was like having each and every “raid” in the game, be set in the exact same dungeon, only with different monster populations to differentiate them. And regardless of whether players participated (and won) or ignored them (and lost), the events never really affected the game world in any meaningful way.

Which (finally!) brings us to Guild Wars 2’s Dynamic Events. I believe that these are next stage in the evolution of this type of automated dynamic gameplay. I will deal with these in my next posting.

It seems like a lot of my attention over the last few weeks has been focused on completing my Guild Wars Hall of Monuments. This is true. Sadly, I’m finding this task to be a lot more challenging than I originally expected.

I started a new Ritualist in the Factions campaign. One of the HoM guides I read suggested that starting a Ritualist and running a Spirit Spammer build was a quick and easy way to complete that campaign. Further, the guide suggested that it could be done by a “new” player in about 25 hours. I figured this would be about a week or two of my effort and I would have two more trophies in the Hall.

So far it has been two weeks. I’ve completed only 9 out of the 13 missions. The next mission appears to be impossible to solo, and my pleading for help online has basically gotten me the answer that I need to complete the Nightfall campaign to level up NPC Heroes to get me through it. This makes me unhappy.

I almost always play a melee class in MMOs. I originally played a Warrior in Guild Wars. And I really enjoy smacking things around until they die. My Hall is based on my original Warrior character since it had the most “complete” and it seemed easier to finish off an 80% done trophy than to restart on a new character. But in the current game, Warriors have been almost completely eclipsed by one of the newer classes in Nightfall, the Dervish.

Then I learned that the Hall was account-wide, and not character wide. So trophies from different characters all count in the Hall. Of course, the catch is that a given character has to actually get the trophy. You can’t, for example, have a one character finish ten missions and then a different character complete the final three and call it done. A single character has to do all 13. But, having done that, the credit for that trophy shows up on all characters on the account.

My hope was to finish Factions, and the “master” mode for that storyline, grab those two trophies, then abandon the Ritualist. Quite honestly, I’m finding that Spirit Spammer playstyle is pretty boring. Basically, you start each fight by dropping five spirits (which are essentially turrets) and then just waiting for things to die. It is a lot like the old Minion Master builds, but without needing to have startup time.

My plan, once finishing Factions, was to use my existing Warrior to complete the “Protector” trophy in the original game (I only need 6 more bonus missions to finish it up), and complete the “Cartographer” trophy (I only need 4% more of the map to be explored to get this one). Once those tasks are in the Hall, I can start a new Dervish in Nightfall. This would replace my existing Warrior for the remainder of the game, and I would run through Eye of the North with the full palette of Heroes as the designers intended.

That’s the plan, anyway. Meanwhile, back in reality, I’m still playing Factions. I’m two weeks in and it looks like I’m going to be working on finishing that campaign for at least two more. Intellectually, I know it’s just a game and that I should be having fun playing it no matter what. But I’m putting a lot of personal pressure on myself to get to a specific point on my accomplishments – a point that seems like it may be unobtainable. And that’s making me treat this game like a job.

I’ve mentioned that I’ve been (re)playing portions of Guild Wars in order to fill out my Hall of Monuments and get some unlockable skins, titles and vanity pets for Guild Wars 2.

Now, let’s be honest. Guild Wars is an OLD game. It was released at the end of April 2005, making it nearly seven years old. Like all MMOs, it has a slash-command that allows the player to track time spent online, in-game. In Guild Wars, the command is /age. Truth be told, I had actually completely forgotten this command and had to ask about it. As it turns out, the /age command not only reports how long you’ve been online on that specific character, it also reports how long your account has been active and how long you’ve been in the current zone.

Despite being one of the original purchasers of the game in 2005, I really never got very far. (For what it's worth, my /age on the original character I created 81 months ago is just about 450 hours. That would be around 5-1/2 hours each month.) I finished the original campaign (called “The Flameseeker Prophesies”) and I played a VERY little bit during the lead-up to the second campaign release. It was essentially DLC that was published as a for-pay expansion called “Factions”. By that time I was pretty much done with guild Wars, so I never purchased it. One of my co-workers was very active in the game and my purchase decision was strongly influenced by his opinion that it was not worth the $60 price of admission.

When the third campaign/DLC/box “Nightfall” was released, I heard a lot of rumblings from other MMO players that this was (finally) a worthy successor to Guild Wars and it was well worth the price. But, by this time, the skills and abilities that were introduced in Factions were widespread in the game. The developers had (rightly) assumed that if you were playing through the newest campaign, you had access to those abilities and had balanced it based on that assumption. Skipping Factions and going straight to Nightfall was said to be “extremely challenging”. So instead of being a worthwhile $60 purchase, for me it would have been a less worthwhile $80 to $100 purchase. I opted not to do so.

The point is that I barely scratched the surface of the game that Guild Wars currently offers. The Hall of Monuments has some easy to achieve trophies, but they are spread out in all three campaigns, two of which I did not own. Since I had stopped playing the game at least four years before the Hall of Monuments was even conceived, I didn’t have many trophies.

My co-worker who played Guild Wars a lot (it was his first MMO) has 23 trophies on his account and he did not even try for them. He just “got” them for doing the stuff he had already finished in the various campaigns. Me, on the other hand... I’m working on finishing achievements by going back and picking missing steps in mostly completed achievements.

One of those is to complete all 25 of the “bonus” missions in the original game. When I first (re)logged in to Guild Wars a couple of weeks ago, it turned out that I had already finished 15 out of the 25! All I needed to do was to complete the ten missing bonus missions and I would get a trophy. The problem, of course, is that the ten bonus missions I was missing included some of the most difficult missions in the game. If you think about it, it makes sense. If it had been easy to get them done, I would have done it already. I’ve got a bit of the completionist OCD in my personality, and I could easily see the six-year-ago me wanting to see crossed swords on EVERY mission shield. (In fact, I recall thinking that exact thing at one time.)

As luck would have it, I ended up in a group of real people (a rarity in Guild Wars these days it seems) and we ran a couple of missions and their bonuses. I ended up just standing around watching one particular player who literally accomplished two missions and two bonus missions, solo.

I’ve been playing MMOs for a long time. I know what the buttons do. I’m pretty fast at learning how skills work and putting together a prettyy solid understanding of gameplay design. I’d like to think that I’m a better than average player. I admit that I am hampered by my (relative) lack of time to play MMOs, and my advancing age has certainly taken the edge off of my skillz. I know there are some people who will literally spend more time playing these games in a single day than I spend in an entire week. (For reference, I typically play one or another MMO for around ten hours a week.) I’m at a point in my life where I realize there are players who are just plain better than me and I’m definitely okay with that.

But, while I was watching him play the game, I felt like a five-year old boy interested in sports being suddenly plunked down on the sidelines of a professional event. More accurately, it would be like a recreational player who has long since left the field of play watching that same professional event. This guy was so much better than me that I wasn’t even sure how he was accomplishing some of the things he was doing. It was definitely amazing, and almost surreal.

Just prior to this, I had run a Real Life friend across a different section of the game. I went as quickly as I could (which was probably about five times faster than my buddy would have been able to manage). When we were about ¾ of the way there, he mentioned that he was feeling like a complete noob watching me because I was making his gameplay look childish. I can’t even imagine how he felt watching this “pro” play the game! For me it was a very humbling experience.

The one consoling thought that I am left with is that a player of a game that has spent seven years perfecting his technique and practicing gameplay is probably going to be quite skilled. When Guild Wars 2 is released later this year, no one will have those years of experience. Many of the standard gameplay tropes we are accustomed to are not present. We will all be starting from square one. And even though my reflexes and eyesight will never be as quick and sharp as a 20-year old’s, I still expect that I will be better than the average player. At least for a little while.

At PAX Prime 2011, I was vaguely interested in Guild Wars 2 but nothing even close to the frothing-at-the-mouth level of intense fanboy-ism that I've recently adopted. (This is kind of an important point to this story, so keep that fact in mind.) So I was wandering around in the Arenanet booth and watching other people play a demo of the starter levels and the two mid-level events they had set up. Each player was allowed only 45 minutes and the line was two or three people deep at best (it was five or six long at some stations). I really didn't feel the need to stand in line for a couple of hours, so I watched other people play. Remember, I was only "interested" at this point. And as an old-time MMO player with over two decades of experience in the genre, watching others play was giving me plenty of information. In fact, I probably had a better "hands on" experience just watching others, since I was able to see two or three different classes at the same time.

It's worth noting that at this point I had not watched any of the promotional videos, done much reading, and I know for sure I had never even heard the phrase WvWvW yet. I only had the barest grasp on basic gameplay mechanics. For example, I knew how weapons skills developed, but I didn't know how weapons skills were selected. I was honestly coming into this as an interested observer, and not as a "fan".

After about a half hour of watching the three stations I was parked in front of, I found an Arenanet rep. I asked a handful of questions about what I had seen and some of my concerns about gameplay. Of the three questions I asked, two of them got me a blank stare for several seconds, followed by a regurgitation of some already well-known basic game info: "Our game is going to be great, because we intend to have... blahblahblah (weaponskills/crafting/dynamicevents/peronsalstory)." Totally not answering my question(s). Which was totally understandable. When you’re at a exhibition with 75,000 attendees, and 95% of them have never even heard of your game, you only need to be able to spout of the most basic info to generate hype. But that’s not what I was interested in. I was already interested, I wanted some specific answers. So I re-asked the same question in a different way. The person I was talking to clearly didn't know how to deal with me, and I most definitely wasn't treading into NDA territory. I've "worked" for a dev before and I know what that looks like. This wasn't that.

It didn't take long for me to be passed off to a "real" dev to deal with. So I asked my original (and still unanswered) questions. This resulted in a several minute long discussion that started out with the exact same marketing/basic info but as soon as I said ten words, we quickly started down into MMO design issues and the intended specific intent in GW2. In a nutshell, my basic questions boiled down to: "What if the player does this other thing you aren't considering? What if they don't want to play the way you expect them to play?" I had an easy to understand, illustrative and completely sane and logical example that I could point to on the screens right in front of us.

The final answer I got was that they really hadn't thought of that, but it was pretty unlikely that anyone would play that way (even though I had just seen someone playing EXACTLY that way not a mere handful of feet from where I was standing). And then came the question that I was totally unprepared for: Hey, would you like to be in our beta? Yes, an Arenanet dev actually asked me if I wanted to be in the GW2 beta!

Now remember when I mentioned (way upstream) that at this point I was only "vaguely interested" in the game? That's why, at that moment in time, that I looked this guy right in the eyes and said "No, thanks for the offer, but I'm not really interested."

Since then, I've learned more about Guild Wars 2 than is probably healthy. I spend a good two hours every day reading speculation posted on various GW2 communities on a handful of message boards. I've "done the math" on various builds already, played with online tools, watched HOURS of YouTube video, and have started picking out which class and race is going to be the right fit for me. I honestly believe that this game will revolutionize MMOs as we know them today. In short, I've made the switch from "interested observer" to the guy who WOULD be willing to stand in a six person line for four-and-a-half hours in order to spend 45 minutes with a time- and feature-limited demo of the game.

And I really, honestly, and truly wish that I could go four months back in time and punch my past-self in the face for turning down a chance to play it sooner.