Guild Wars 2 FBW: Saturday

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Category: Giskard's Blog

Last Updated on Sunday, 22 July 2012 01:59

Written by Giskard

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Today I managed to get a level high enough that I could survive leaving the start area. Which for a Guardian turns out to be around level 15.

Guardians spend the early game charging towards enemies only to see them die by in a hail of fireballs and arrows before they arrive, then when you get away from the start zones in to the country, they start to come in to their own, taking on NPCs that are 3 or 4 levels higher with easy. Unlike Necromancers that seem to be 3 or 4 levels behind other classes.

The characters that did well in packs usually do a lot of running away in the country whilst the Guardians stand toe to toe with the bad guys and slug it out. Often knocking the baddies on their asses.

I got my character to level 20 which means I know have 4 utility slots for spells, Guardians offer a lot of support spells so are basically Paladins under a different name. The staff fights which I tried fairly late on are especially useful for supporting large groups of players and offer the only form of ranged attack I have seen for Guardians so far.

As I explored the world it became clear that experienced players were power levelling by going from 1 encounter to another over and over again. Thus allowing them to level up quickly. Whilst playing with DOW for most of the day, I often tried to steer him in a direct line towards a destination only to see  him zigzag around the world in apparently random ways. One step forward, then a race back in the opposite direction for no apparent reason.

Turns out he was jumping from one event to another to level faster.

I tried it and found it to be the second fastest way to level, the fastest being to find a spot were baddies gave large bonuses and just run back and forth killing them. At over 50 bonus points per kill, you just need to kill 10 creatures to keep up with event bonuses and usually you can exceed that easily whilst exploring high bonus areas.

Personally I found the power levelling boring, the game is better when your exploring and doing quests, jumping from one event to another may be a good way to level but it just recreates the grinding that Arenanet said they had tried to do away with.

Grinding means repeating the same tasks to get higher levels, over and over again.

It appears they reinvented the same wheel again.

Especially since the level requirements for each quest mean you have to do events to get the level high enough to do the next quest, or sooner or later you will fall too far behind and find the mission impossible to complete.

For example I did the final quest for the demo at level 16, when it was supposed to be for level 19 characters.

The official guild server "Far Shiverpeaks" seems to be packed out, forcing me on to the overflow server more often than not. It is probably popular with World v world players so they all jump on the same server because it keeps winning or something, but my experience of world v world on a busy server was it became an unplayable slide show, thus making the choice a mute point unless you have a super computer.

Come the final release, I may switch back to Sharps Corner since being able to play the game rates higher than winning in world v world games. Currently the highest frame rate I get when its good is 20 fps but the average is 10 fps.

Which is a lot lower than I was getting on Sharps Corner.

I will add that playing Guildwars 2 makes me want to mod Skyrim even more, lol...

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