I’ve been playing Guild Wars 2 from the very first demo weekend, but I’ve never really become an “expert” player … I’m just another one of the huge mass of “filthy casuals” that the really good players complain about. And people do complain about GW2:
It’s long puzzled me that GW2 can both have a reputation as one of the most casual mainstream MMOs, demanding a low level of player skill and little in the way of dedicated discipline and organization, while simultaneously being castigated for the unforgiving difficulty of almost all of its high-level open world content.
As soon as the first cohort of players started to trickle into Orr, five years ago, the complaints began: the mobs were too tough, there were too many of them, they didn’t play fair. Orr got a good few thumps with the nerf bat and the complaints quietened down, only to return with just about every new piece of max-level content or large-scale, open world set piece event we’ve seen since.
I haven’t played many other MMOs, so perhaps I’m taking the nature of GW2‘s combat for granted:
Talking about whether a particular MMO is or is not “casual friendly” isn’t going to get us far when we can never agree on a definition of “casual”. That’s always been a stumbling block to my own understanding of why it should have been that I, playing with what I would self-identify as a casual mindset, experienced Heart of Thorns [the first GW2 expansion] as a liberating, exhilarating explorer’s paradise, while others, similarly self-identifying, found it a constraining, frustrating turn-off.
UltrViolet, returning from a long sabbatical from the game to give the demo a run, found it confusing and frustrating in a whole number of ways, most of which I heartily endorse. As an advertisement for the game it has all the welcoming warmth of a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. What I found particularly interesting, however, was his description of the combat experience:
“It is a typical GW2 fight – totally chaotic, a million bad guys throwing a million AoEs and other effects at you all simultaneously.”
Exactly, in other words, just what I love most about combat in GW2. It’s explosive, colorful, exuberant and above all utterly chaotic. It’s the kind of combat I think many of us dreamed about back when we were root-rotting treants in West Karana, standing motionless, casting a spell every thirty seconds or so then sitting down to meditate so we’d have enough mana to cast another thirty seconds later.
GW2‘s frenetic, rolling, dodging, mayhem, where everyone is healing herself and everyone else, where buffs last seconds and part of the gameplay relies on battle-rezzing anyone who goes down, is exactly the kind of free-rolling, liberating fun many of us could never even have dared to imagine, back when we were huddled together in the corner of a dank cave beneath the Crypt of Nadox, shaking with fear as we prayed our tank could hold agro and no roamers would wander along and add.
You mean other MMOs aren’t a blazing, eye-searing mass of particle effects as soon as combat begins?
So why isn’t everyone loving it the way I do? Jeromai can explain:
“The number one killer of people used to other MMOs – staying stationary or facetanking mobs in GW2. Every time.
You can observe this phenomenon on Twitch or if you watch newbies in the lowbie zones and so on. They lumber up and just STAND THERE because that’s what they do in other MMOs to attack. They expect a tank to deflect the aggro and a healer to take care of their health.
You’re thinking, “OMG move move too much damage incoming you can’t heal that up with your self heal OMG red circle why u stand there still plz MOVE”
Couple minutes later, they fall over. RIP.”
Well, no wonder. No wonder people are finding it hard. No wonder they aren’t enjoying themselves. I had no idea.
After all, why would I? Here’s my description of how I play, from my own comment at Why I Game:
“My tactics, if you could flatter them with such a name, are to fire off every ability on my hotbar as often as it becomes available, while moving constantly. I don’t just dodge all the time, I run about, jump on objects, strafe and generally behave like a toddler on a sugar rush who just peed up against an electric fence”.
It’s a slight exaggeration. I don’t always do that. If the situation requires it, I can be more tactical and anyway I do have a few channeled skills that require me to stand still. In general, though, I like to keep moving.
