Month: March 2012

It is quickly apparent that there won’t be situations where I can just close my eyes and AoE until everything I over-aggro dies simply because I am 10 levels above. Missed or overleveled content will actually have to be played.
— Ravious on Guild Wars 2

Guild Wars is known for having a flat leveling curve, capping early at 20 and staying there. You can feel the change in that design philosophy as you go back in time to Prophecies. In Nightfall, you are near the level cap when you leave the first region. In Prophecies, I was almost to the last mission and still steamrollering almost everything. Levels were lower and the expected player resources were, too.

There are huge zones full of enemies I can’t care about, and it is just an annoyance to cross them in search of some bit of early content. The first mission involves scouting a charr invasion, one that I could single-handedly end given the level differences and my AE skills.

This is the game most famed for its flat leveling curve, but where the curve exists, it really exists. I get sloppy rampaging through these, and I am looking forward to hard mode so I can try them at a meaningful difficulty. In the meantime, I am seeing how many level 10-16 enemies a group of level 20 heroes can aggro without any threat.

: Zubon

I have mentioned playing Guild Wars with the wiki open. Here is a great example of why, one I wish I knew about before heading in.

“An Avicara near Mineral Springs may spawn behind portal requiring to rezone.”

That is what you are seeing in the picture: at the far side of the zone, a group of enemies can spawn outside the zone. Those tricks you’re thinking of to possible reach it? They don’t work. There is no outpost on that side of the zone, so to vanquish Tasca’s Demise you must cross the entire zone, and if that spawn is outside the world, you must leave through the far portal, come back, and keep re-zoning until those enemies spawn inside the zone.

This bug has presumably existed for years and absorbed hundreds of hours of time from players who stumbled upon it while trying to vanquish the zone without having read the wiki first. No one ever prioritized fixing a bug that made part of the content impossible without repeatedly restarting.

: Zubon

A month and a half ago, Heart of the Shiverpeaks was a wall for me. I had jumped to Eye of the North on a bonus reputation weekend, and Eye of the North makes some assumptions about the resources you have available to you as a player. I did not meet that expectation.

Today, I went back to the Heart of the Shiverpeaks with some touch rangers. We rolled through the place and over the boss. We continued through the rest of the campaign and crushed the Big Bad. I turned on hard mode, and the Great Destroyer still fell in less time and it took to run to him.

Nothing changed, but everything’s different now.

: Zubon