Category: Guild Wars

The first few titles I saw had just a couple of tiers: survivor, drunkard, party animal (I started during a festival, so I had booze and candy before I had a secondary profession). Then I met “Cartographer.” That is normal, an achievement for exploring the whole map. It starts at 60% and tiers up, makes sense.

I did not notice until this weekend that it goes all the way to 100%. This explains much that I have seen in the wiki. Zone descriptions talk about how the docks count as 0.1% of the map, or you can get an extra pixel by “scraping” the walls of a zone, or that 101% is possible. When I was thinking that you were done at 80% or 90%, that seemed super-Completist. Now I’m worried that I need to step foot on almost every square centimeter of the world if I want to add that to the Hall of Monuments.

I am saving that one for once I start trying hard mode vanquishing anyway. I just feel for folks who were stuck at 99.8% and spent weeks scouring maps for the dozen pixels that needed to be stepped on because they had an invisibly brief lag spike one day while pushing against a rock.

: Zubon

One Guild Wars design decision that beats the competition is the crafting storage tab. Crafting materials stack up to 250, and one tab of your storage holds one stack of each. All storage in Guild Wars is shared, so all your (post-Searing) characters have access. You could duplicate the effect by giving players two more storage tabs, since this is effectively 36 slots, but this comes pre-organized and of course for the specific purpose of crafting. (NCSoft could also remove the cap of 250, which seems arbitrary, low for common materials and very high for rare.) Aligning with other design decisions, Guild Wars does not have tiers of crafting materials as you level up, although having a crafting tab would be even more useful there (potentially messier in the UI).

Splitting “crafting storage,” Guild Wars crafting is not exactly rigorous. The crafters are basically collector NPCs with shared materials. Storage in Guild Wars is simple, shared, and rather inadequate if you want to keep all those collector drops. The vault is expandable at $10/pane, which feels a bit pricey, although it’s tempting with all these frog and bug bits about. I need to do some muling.

: Zubon

Here is a bad design decision that seems easy to band-aid. Guild Wars starts missions in Prophecies and Nightfall with a button under the character list, while in Nightfall and Eye of the North with an NPC dialogue. This is poor, having something be a UI element in one place and part of the world in another. I started in Nightfall, as most seemed to recommend, then played some Eye of the North and just this week visited Factions. Nothing tells you about the “enter mission” button. There is absolutely nothing in-game that tells you how to start the mission unless you notice that a button appeared in the UI.

I have commented on how Guild Wars players and wikipedians assume that you have a sizable resource base. It reaches a new tier when the developers forget that they designed the game as three expand-alones rather than a base Guild Wars with expansion packs (and then one actual expansion pack shared across the three). There is a handy mission to introduce you to the other campaigns, but whoever wrote it must never have thought that you might be starting with Nightfall and not already know how things work in Prophecies and Factions.

The in-game help is already a link to the wiki. Your players should not need to then Google to try to figure out what they need to ask the wiki.

: Zubon

Psychonauts did the same thing by giving you inventory items without telling you that you have an inventory or how to access it.

In Guild Wars, you buy skills once, at that even unlocks them for heroes on the account. Guild Wars has the rather odd design feature that not every skill trainer has the same skills. If you want to get all the skills for your class, you need to tour around to different cities. Not all the cities and outposts have skill trainers. Secondary profession changers might be somewhere else entirely, and you need to have swapped to that profession to buy the skills. Some of the trainers are in explorable zones, so you cannot change your build after picking up the new skills.

Is there anything at all to recommend this design for skill training? I’m down with picking up elite skills from bosses, but aside from having a few early trainers with only a few options, which you could also do by hiding some skills until level X, what benefit is there to having this random spread of skills and trainers across the zones? And campaigns, because not all the basic skills are in all the campaigns.

: Zubon

You can call the skills whatever you want. The effect is what matters. So why force players to re-learn the same skills by calling it “beast strike” or some such when you can just re-use the normal class skill?

That was presumably the thought process, but what was your reaction the first time you ran into groups of dinosaurs with necromantic powers?

: Zubon

saurian blood cultists on the next Jerry Springer show

I’m not there yet, not having even completed a full campaign yet, but I can sort of poke at it. I am getting how it works in terms of hard modes and team builds and such, although in mostly abstract terms. It is interesting being able to watch it coalesce.

Items I keep reading about are becoming relevant. I acquired a couple of elite skills, my first Zaishen coins, and a couple of Gifts of the Traveler. I farmed something, which I have not done in an MMO in a long while. I met Professor Yakkington, although it turns out his degree is honorary.

I suppose the next step is finding a guild, now that I might be capable of understanding what they’re saying. [Update: tried the Heart of the Shiverpeaks mission. Yes, I either need humans or to advance quite a few things across the campaigns.]

: Zubon

One thing I am aware of but that has yet to fully become a part of me is that Guild Wars is not a game for “your build.” There is a baked-in expectation that you will vary your build to the circumstances, rather than seeing just how well build X works. My usual Ranger loadout has been based around the combo poison-bleed-Epidemic, so when half the enemies in a mission are fleshlessly immune to poison and bleeding, 3/8 of my skills are useless. I don’t see the game seeing this as a problem, because you can leave and come back with other skills or even another secondary profession. Different builds will play dramatically differently, but you cannot switch on the fly, so it is kind of like my old dream system of giving you many alt options painlessly without repeated level-grinding. But I need to get into the mindset that this is Schroedinger’s character, who is at one moment this, one moment that, and at all times all of them.

Looking for some recommendations on a Ranger build, I learned that Guild Wars players will design builds to farm exactly two spawns. This is a new degree of specialization beyond my habits.

Two other things I am learning about Guild Wars recommendations? They take into account that the game is about to turn 7. They expect that you have all the skills and probably all the elite skills. Commenters have helpfully been providing suggestions for my newb experience, but Guild Wars builds are based around elite skills, and I don’t even recognize the zone names where you can get those skills. Similarly, because of all the above points, the game seems to be balanced around the assumption that you know what you are about to fight (and will bring the appropriate skills/party). I refer to games/levels/etc. as being “fair” if you could reasonably beat them without knowledge from previous playthroughs. Some builds must have a larger margin of error for that, but Guild Wars does not share that principle, as with the missions in which 3/8 of your skills are useless for the boss fight. So these are some knowledge barriers to adapt to unless I am just exploring GW as a single player game.

: Zubon