GW Grind gripes get greatly overegsaggerated

Yes I still play it.
I still play it because I'm a stubborn bastard who doesn't know when to quit.

I'm a socially inept bastard who out of necessity relies on heroes and henchies to do almost everything in-game (thus making it single-player) and I am determined, having paid the money to get the game and the expansions in the first place, to get my money's worth out of it no matter how long it takes me.

I almost regret ever buying it in the first place. I was somewhat content when the height of my online gaming experience was Phantasy Star Online (which I actually pwned at, miraculously enough).... but I felt that I needed to at least try Guild Wars...

Well now I'm in there and fighting my way through it out of pure determination not to be beaten... and complaining every time I have just about reached my goal and then a whole load of harder crap gets added to the game, forcing me essentially back to stage 1. I feel like A-Net are dangling any sense of achievement I could get from this game just outside my reach like a carrot on a stick.

[And for the record... I'm also a cheap bastard... as I chose Guild Wars rather than any other online RPG because of the lack of fees. I've since come to appreciate its instanced nature (much like PSO was) and ability to let me play single-player to at least some extent. While any other MMORPG would consist primarily of grind and be within my reach in that respect, I would have to learn to solo the entire thing and pay for it besides, which would just lead to stress...]

If you expect the game to set your goals for you, then the replay value will seem limited. They've created a bunch of goals that are parallel to core gameplay, and some people find it fun to try and achieve them. But there is a lot of room for totally invented goals that have nothing to do with titles or the core game.

At some point, someone decided it would be a good idea to run from Beacon's Perch to Camp Rankor all in one go. Armor was the primary motivation, but I'm sure once they started working on it, just getting there was probably pretty satisfying. Most solo tactics started the same way, I'm sure.

Taken in that light, the replay value of this game is immense. But it's true that the game doesn't dictate a hard, linear progression of goals that stretch out to infinity, or even to a set maximum.

I have 0 builds for any of my characters (though I am lazy enough to have templates for my heroes), because every time I go out I create a new one. If you've never made a bar with poisoned heart then you're missing out. Guild wars is a game of taking 8 skills and making them work. Just because it isn't on a wiki build doesn't mean it shouldn't be played.

Grinding for luxury "for looks" items is a tangent, trying to play the basic game isn't and you should not have to grind for it. I would consider the following basic game content
1) Basic Equipment - mostly there with collectors stuff. Still missing collectors upgrades
2) Progressing the story line - Kurzick/Luxon/Sunspear requirements let GW down in this category.
3) Skills - GW is terrible here. Without mindless farming, there's no way to get the gold and skillpoints required to buy them. Tomes haven't been around for long, but I can only hope that they increase the drop rate now that they have prevented farming.

"The rest of us" are certainly not all happy with Hard Mode - there are complaints all over the forums from experienced players.

Why though?

There are two possible answers to this, either:

- If you don't like the idea of Hard Mode, don't play it. It wasn't there a week ago, and if you like you can pretend it's not here now. Its existence doesn't impact the Normal Mode game

or

- Maybe you were expecting something different from Hard Mode, and it has disappointed you. If so, what has disappointed you? What else were you expecting it to be? (and please don't say "easier")

Regardless, grind is pretty subjective, but compared to other games of this nature it's pretty minimal (except for maybe rank???)

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Added by Moderator: Off-topic comment removed. Check out this if you're interested in the answer though.

BTW, I kind of like Hard mode.

It's feel it's just a little bit too hard for me so far, but I think I could learn to do it right. My mesmer liked clearing Dejarin estates the other day, though. Finally felt useful.

Apart from that, however, I hope hard mode doesn't start a whole horde of elitism, all about "Hard mode is easy. What, you still play normal? That's for kids!".

I found just by playing doing all the quests and missions (no matter which game, Tryia, Elona, Cantha) you do have enough to get 100% of your primary job and if you "hand pick" stuff from your secondary without trying to hard.

This also holds true when you bring your character over to a new campaign, the rewards from the new campaign more then pay for the skills if you do the quests / missions.

It's when you divert the money to extravagant things you may be short. Now once you have a character that's gone through the game, it tends to generate excessive money that can be used to speed develop new characters - go after the extravagant things with ease.

I get my primary skills for each character (don't farm either) easily.

Side Note: I love hard mode - I fine it really challenging. It's caused me to evolve my builds, become a better player, and think differently. I also view HM as "optional" part of the game. And I do love the drops (I see an increase).

QFT

If there were no title at all, you would still have people who would unfog whole map, finish every single bonus, have survivor characters, etc ...

This kind of achievents is way more precious ... you can clearly see that those people had fun doing what they were doing.

so, stop caring about titles that are not fun for you to achieve and have your own goals ... they might not come with neat progress bar and title ... but again, this game is not progressquest.

For example, mine goal is to have battleready character of each profession (= every outpost unlocked, all the skills for primary profession, headpiece and weapons set for each attribute, all complementary secondary skills, all secondaries unlocked, basically you name class, build and locating and i will be there ...) There will be never title for that, but that does not stop me from doing it.

I only have one such, and even that requires a certain amount of grinding: My personal desire to have every single one of my characters dressed in pink armour... preferably a shade that doesn't clash with my guild cape.
Oddly enough, I'd do the Grandmaster Cartographer thing even if there weren't titles for it as I am near-rabid in my insistance on wiping out Fog-of-War in any game.
But that is about it.
I'm not fond of trying to be creative with my goals in a world where the reach of my creativity is necessarily limited. I leave that for games like Morrowind where I can edit it to my heart's content.

Admittedly though since I downloaded that Unreal kill-sounds mod I keep aiming rather ridiculously for the highest chain kill sound I can get sometimes, which interferes severely with my in-game behaviour.



Something that was an optionally more difficult version of normal with no other benefit besides the satisfaction of being able to complete it.... i.e. NO Hard-mode-only titles that could be rubbed in the faces of those who aren't good enough for it (especially those who play the game to collect titles).

I don't know why people talk about grind as if it's something objective.

I've heard people complain about solo farming as a grind, and doing all the sidequests on all characters as a grind. Those are some of my favourite things to do in this game. As for hard mode, I like trying to vanquish areas (and will persist until I get horribly frustrated). But I can't stand the idea of doing the missions, for the 11th+ time, and trying to get masters, again, just because the monsters are tougher. I used to find farming sunspear/lightbringer points annoying but i'm currently enjoying repeatedly vanquishing the shattered ravines for some reason.

The point is, one person's grind is another person's fun. I hear people talk about other games and call them a worse grind - but people still play them, perhaps because they don't consider it a grind.

The best thing about GW is that no percieved "grind" is necessary. Even faction and sunspear points... if you do the quests and take the bounties, you never have to farm specifically for them. No one is making you do hard mode or farm lb points or whatever.

My only problem is that most titles are character specific. I know that it makes sense but... I have a lot of characters that I like equally. Makes it hard to decide who should get what title. (oh and I don't like it that lockpicks are more retainable with treasure and lucky titles... helping the rich get richer).

As for 15k armor: I've made more than enough money on each character going through nightfall to buy their own sets of 15k. And that was before the treasure chests. No farming required.

The biggest grind is caused by lack of balance in the PvE professions. I dont know why players even put up with it.

Lets say your ranger beats nightfall and wants to do DoA. However, rangers are not allowed in DoA... so you have to restart as an elementalist, and re-do 26 missions that you already beat, skill cap the rare skills that you needs, farm yourself armor equipment and skills, farm yourself a sunsepear title just to get passed locked gates, farm yourself a decent lightbringer title, and then, only then, are you allowed to play in the area that you already had access to, but werent allowed to play in.

Anet's answer to lack of balance in PvE (some professions do not have useful skillsets to even bother atempting certain areas & have nothing to add to a group) essentially boils down to: "go buy an extra character slot and deal with it."

In this way, true grind form, you end up slogging through low level mobs you beat several times just to experience the game.

I agree with the fact hard mode was a cop out. All they did was allow the mobs to go outside the realm of balance and force us to rely on hinges like we did in DoA.

Sorrow's Furnace is a perfect example of how to make an area challenging enough to require well oiled groups without allowing the opposing force to cheat their ass off. Making hard mode require hours upon hours to vanquish a single area (snakedance comes to mind) as a result of innate abilities the mobs have, was unnecessary.

Now that they've removed the simple and mundane ways of acquiring loot, IE going out and sucking in 50 whites and selling them for a couple grand, you are pretty much forced to do vanquishing, or invest in items to farm UW, or hunt greens for hours on end. Some of us play this game because we don't have to live inside it. If you have to spend 3 hours straight getting your hands on a green item to fund 10 skills, you lose that legendary aspect of GW. Now with the options for how to make gold dwindling, the drops will decrease, the number of such items will increase, value will go down, and the set prices for armor, skills, etc, will not.

You don't have to play Hard Mode if you think it's lame, but they're dragging the ways to make money out of the game, leaving you with just the time intensive and boring methods.

Me.

On my PvE ele I have:
55 NEcro
66 Ranger
73 Warrior
61 Ritualist
255 Total
skills left to go.
I have 77.5% of the skills in the game available.

Already got everything unlocked for PvP.

I play a lot but I don't call it grind because the game isn't making me do stuff to accomplish what I want. All of my goals in the game are goals I set for myself not something the game requires.

ppl who likes to grind should just play other games...
and it's not a need to get all the skills..... the trick is to use what you have and beat the ----- out of the other player..

I'm making way more gold now. Whites are a very poor source of income compared to all purples & golds (which I'm getting may more of in HM)..

It's one of the features from guildwars IMO, you get to choose wich grind you want to do or not to grind at all.
You don't need all skills, but i know a lot of people including myself who try to give pve characters all of the skills of their class.

For me the most boring grinds is completing chapters you already did before just to get those skill caps you want.
There are still enough of these grinds to involve yourself in after you completed a chapters storyline, wether you'd want to try them is a different story.
So in answer i'd say it's not overrated, but it's a choice to grind for certain aspects.

I have no issues with grinding out titles and things that I want to achieve. It is fun, it makes the game last longer and more enjoyable for me. It seems some people want to finish the game in a week without putting a tad bit of effort into the game. If things were too easy to obtain then there would be nothing left for any of us to do. Its just my opinion but that is how i look at it.

Grind aye?

Well I was grinding away at the Lightbringer title by doing LB runs in depths of madness, then suddenly in all their wisdom(gonna make normal easier?) Anet descided to change the spawns drastically in this area. ALL the Shadow groups now have Elementals in them which were not there before. Minions + Ele Damage = no minions. I had gotten to lvl 7 of my LB title out here by developing a pattern to follow, but I guess that was wrong. Seems that no matter what I try to do in my little niche of the game, anet has to nerf or otherwise screw it up for me. Just like they were supposed to open up the sunspear title track, yea well nothing was said about Hard Mode being the only way you can do it. Seems to me that the casual player who has been faithfull to GW all this time since the release of Prophecies has gotten nothing but shafted at every turn. Seems as though they dont want us average players even playing the game.
I have always conscidered myself to be an average player. Example if doing an mission or area that takes 3+ hours to complete is fine with you.... then you are NOT an average player. I think that any mission or area that takes much over an hour to complete is simply uncalled for. That is for those so-called elite players out there. But anet has heard a handful of these said elite players complain that things were too easy, so they have taken it to be an insult to their programming capabilities and descided to make Hard Mode.
Which would be fine if I could complete my titles in normal. The lightbringer and sunspear titles were never slated to be only completeable in HM so what gives?
I have this opinion that keeps nagging at me; if a title is made for normal mode then it should be able to be completed in normal mode.

I'm thinking they got it all backwards. The people who are the most successful players will be going to hard mode, and the more regular players (like me of course) who do not have the time, patience, wherewithal, whatever are staying in mostly normal mode.

Uh, the successful hard mode players are not the ones who need the skill tome drops. Or the extra dinero. It's us regular players who need that stuff more than the hardcore.

Just a thought.

Thanks!
TabascoSauce