Re: The Wolf's Den, beware of howling
Yeah it looked amazing, but I found the questing hilariously enough super boring. It feels funny saying I prefer the WoW quest style that is so boring on paper. I only really had a single day where I was all "I can't stop playing", which I normally have for weeks when I e.g. start playing WoW.
Overall my main issues were:
Gameplay:
Too few skills. You have 5 core abilities depending on which weapon combo you choose, and you get all these in the span of a few kills. All other abilities are either passive buffs (with a use) or cooldowns. As you can tell the variety really lacks. In addition you never feel like you "become awesome", since everything scales. Sure killing lowbie mobs does become easier as you get % better gear than you had in that level, plus you only get scaled down "the necessary levels", so you could e.g. be scaled down to lvl 8 while killing lvl 6 mobs. But in current levels you always feel rather weak as the mobs hit hard and you need to play really seriously to play well with all the dodging and all. One would think that being given a challenge would be interesting, but to me I grew bored. I thought perhaps it was my Thief class, so I tried another, but nothing really changed.
Questing/Leveling:
The levels are too slow and static. I really like how it's done in e.g. Diablo and WoW. Blizzard has IMO mastered the art of leveling and game progression. Getting levels fast in the beginning and slower as you progress, but the rewards are worth the wait. In GW2 you get all your core abilities right away, and all you really have to wait for is unlocking more slots to place buffs/cooldowns in. Super static and feels very dull. In addition the leveling is almost constant. What I mean is it's not a big difference between how fast you reach level 1-2 and 34-35
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These are my main issues, but I have a lot of minor ones too that I won't bother listing e.g. the gear design looks EXACTLY THE SAME (like 3 different noob outfits all look crap) for eternity. I still see lvl 70+ guys walk around with the same crap looking gear I do. So damn boring when you get new gear and it looks the same as your previous piece... Overall it felt like a huge miss for me. Nice graphics though.