Guild Wars and Respecs

Here's an interesting statistic.

The sampling methodology is described on the page. 80% of low level, and 40% of high level characters get abandoned (don't log back in). While the sampling there was only during period of two months, it does show that a very large portion of players either stops playing, or rolls a new character.

Most players never reach the point where change of attributes would matter. Since in WoW you cannot change many things, most people simply abandon the characters (the study cannot differentiate between deleted characters and those not played anymore).

Yes and no. Since respecs cost money, it tends to make people a little more careful about where they put they're points (of course, most people pre-70 usually have their characters sporting some sort of bad build, but that's expected). Hellgate:London has *no respecs whatsoever*. That means if you screw up, gg.

The price of respecs in WoW start small at a meager 1gold. It can grow to a maximum of 50 gold per respec in (I think?) increments such as 1g-5g-10g-15g or something like that.

I was going to try HL, but now I won't. BTW I love TF2. If you decide to go with Quake Wars, let me know how you like it.

For those who wont realise.... 1 gold in WoW is ALOT! So its still not cheap to respec in Wow, but atleast they can.

The thing is though, Hellgate London sucks anyway. Regardless of the respec issue, the game is still very flawed. Mainly because of the visuals and then because of the randomising thing. I really dont understand how you can have outposts dotted about in a game, but the entire outside instance can change completely?

Whos bright idea was that!

I'd hate to be a Londoner expecting to see your local pub and it keeps popping up in completely randomised instances, on different street corners everytime. Its one thing to randomise the creatures, but the locations should be set in stone.

You cant form true specialised PUGs because you have no idea what your fighting or where! People will just end up using cookie cut builds that fit every situation.

Which actually makes the non-respec thing worse!

1) You have to face off against completely random creatures everytime so its pot luck if your build works.
2) Your spec cant change, so what happens if you come up against a creature your not spec'd for?

^ Yeh I've re-specced my paladin twice on the way up to lvl 50 and that sounds about right. Bearing in mind that gold in WoW is worth a lot more than gold coins in GW. As mobs drop copper, silver then gold depending on what level they are. I've yet to break 100 gold more than once but then I always spend it too fast.

My other half is playing Hellgate at the moment, he's undecided whether to bother going online properly with it as we can't justify paying subs for more than one MMO at a time.

No it isn't.

Randomized dungeons are actually a pretty awesome plus for many. It adds some nice replayability, ever since Diablo invented it way back when (actually false. See post #51 by Zwei2stein.

The reason that no respeccing isn't as important in Hellgate:London is because every person has the same role - DPS. No matter where your points are put, you're likely still going to be able to kill things.

And the game can be completely solo'd, anyways. You have the *option* of being able to group with people.

It's not Guild Wars. H:L is more about skill rather than skills.

To be fair, it is still a very fun game in the same way that Diablo 2 is a very fun game. In fact, they appear to have copied almost every mechanic in that game directly from D2, although they are considering respecs. They've also said they will allow respecs after skill balances, which seems kinda half-assed to me. Guild Wars has by fair the most forgiving and flexible system of any game I've ever played - and it's fun as hell. There's no reason to stick arbitrary restrictions on players.

Saraphim- It's worth buying, but not worth subscriving to right now, as your 10 bucks a month gets you essentially nothing.

EDIT:

That's not 100% true. There are clear tanks, clear AoE characters, single target DPS characters, meatshielding characters, and defensive support characters. Most players just tend to play with solo builds, because if you can only pick one build that's your best choice.

Yea I agree that's not the best thing to say. Would it be more accurate to say "each class can do just as fine if on its own"?

I pretty much agree with all of that. Most games respeccing isn't strictly necessary, but is a nice option to have (though it should probably cost something). In GW, they've designed the game around being able to respec, so it's absolutely crucial.

Well either way im being a hypercrit cos I was gonna buy it anyway to tide me over until GW2

Yes they are awesome, something like them would make gw soooo much better.

btw: diablo did nto invent then, just was first game with random dungeons to attract masses.

(cough) adom, nethack, rogue ... (cough)

Greetings, everyone. I'm ShivanSwordsman, from the Hellgate London forums. I'm not a mod or some big wig, but I have played both Guild Wars and Hellgate London.

Now, the thing is... I love Guild Wars. To death. When I can't stand HG:L anymore (which is about 2 hours a night at a time at most), I swap over to Team Fortress 2 or Guild Wars. I love building my characters, testing builds, and Heroes. Good God I love playing with heroes. I love tweaking them and creating a group synergy and just going nuts.

The thing is, I love flexible, casual friendly systems like Guild Wars is using. I played the Beta of Guild Wars, and I was astonished at the sheer capacity of suck they had going on. Of course, I came back just this year's April, I believe it was... and I just love it. I love ABing, I love the fact all the events are free, I love the fact there's no online fee, and love the fact that once you buy the game/an expansion, you have it's contents forever.

Hellgate London strips whatever you bought the previous month from you and makes it unusable to you if it's labeled subscriber. This includes any dungeons, cities, classes (yes, even classes. The 3 other classes they had advertised there being originally in the box game are subscriber only), items, the works.

You can pay that month, but to continue access, you keep paying. You also get only 3 character slots if you don't subscribe, and if you do, you lose all those characters you created in the 4 - 24 slots if you stop subscribing. I dare say the devs hate anyone that isn't a subscriber. Add in the fact with these 3 dinky spaces that we currently have no shared stashes or respecs, and you can genuinely see that things are going to crap. FAST.

I gave Guild Wars the time it needed to mature. For me, the ass kicking came with the creation of heroes (a friend of mine let me try out their Nightfall pass. I was hooked, and still am!). I know not every game should be like the other, but most games offer respecs.

Hell, FFXI let you change your job AND subjob at your mog house, and look how ancient that is. It's like FSS decided to take one step back and recreate Diablo without adding ANY of the advancements the industry has made, and instead focus on graphics.

Sorry to rant like this, I'm just dissappointed in Hellgate as a whole, and am in fact quite the GW fan due to the community of the build builders, and the fact it requires so much thought to make your build and get 8 skills that work together well, and distribute your points to make everything work. That's why right now I'm not playing Hellgate, and am currently thumbing either TF2 or GW.

LOL thats funny lol unless your being serious (which I know your not)

More or less yes, but it goes down over time. So if you only respec one per month it will always cost you only 1 gold, and by the time you get far enough that a respec even matters, making 1g is an hour's work at most.

In WoW, you can put every skill your character has ever learned all on your 'bar' at the same time. My WoW shaman has 120 buttons on her screen. So in WoW, all a respec is is adjusting modifiers to your skills - do you get a +10% to fireballs or a 70% chance to block interrupts while healing or can you summon imps 20% faster, etc...

So while they cost, the cost is cheap, and the impact is a lot smaller than what a re-spec would mean in GW - where you have a limited bar of 8 skills available at a time.

I'm not so sure about those stats about abandoned characters. They do get abandoned, but my perception is that most long term players -do- make it to the higher levels. People either make it, or stop playing WoW. As a result, on most WoW servers, the bulk of the population is at max level.

Check stats on warcraftrealms.com - those stats are made by saving the results of /who inquiries made through an add-on thousands of users use and then upload the results of. Through those stats you can find the actual 'played' population, as well as track the general history of any character in the game - how fast have they leveled, what guilds have they belonged to, when did they join or quit, etc. Combine it with blizzard's own stats website and you can even see how they specc'd and what gear they use (something many of us WoW players find unethically invasive).

I was in beta and, while the game is fun, the implementation is, IMHO, horrendous.

I was originally considering taking the founder's deal, thinking most of the annoyances would be ironed out (there's no unstuck feature.... yet every instance has multiple open areas you can jump into but not out of.... wtf?), but the straw that broke the camel's back was probably the revelation that they're including paid advertising in all versions without reducing the price any, and that the EULA is written such that EA can basically snoop on anything it wants to in your computer so far as your hardware and software go.

The whole respeccing thing is extraordinarily lame, though. I think throughout beta I probably carried all but two or three points because I was afraid to use them for fear that I'd screw up something and have a useless character that I'd invested a lot of time in. It's one thing when it's Diablo and I can play the game for years while only paying $50, it's something else entirely when I also have to pay a subscription fee each month.

HG:L, in my opinion, had a lot of promise, but only delivered a lot of suck. It's a prime example of what happens when you let business majors instead of designers and developers build a game.

As far as WoW and the value of currency goes, 1 gold is an awful lot to a Warrior, maybe not so much to someone wearing cloth.

One of the many dumb design decisions in WoW is the cost to repair equipment. While it's obviously just a gold sink designed to force you to keep playing to get more gold, it's not very well balanced. Warriors often LOSE money on instances because it costs an outrageous amount to repair their armor, whereas they don't get any more out of the run than Warlocks and other cloth-users who pay magnitudes less to repair things.

Of course, nitpicking things that suck in WoW (for anybody who isn't level 70 at least) is kind of like trying to track a raindrop after it falls in the ocean...

1 gold in WoW is about the same as 500g in GW. The first time I went through pre-searing and played my first month or so of GW, it took me -forever- to get even 500g. Its been a long time, but I think my first character to ever make it out of pre-searing had less than 300g on her.

But once I broke past that, I could repeat the entire process in an hour, and now I can do more than 1 platinum in that same time span.

The same thing happens in WoW. You spent your first 5 levels counting copper, your next 10-15 counting silver, and then from 20-40 your counting gold to get to 90 (and buy a mount). Level 40 and you're down to 0 again, but by level 43 you're well over 100g, and by the time you hit Outlands at 58, you're approaching 200g or you managed it poorly. One of my guild members had hit 1000g at that point, -before- entering Outlands. Once in Outlands if you can't clear 10g+ a day you're playing it wrong.

Thanks, I think I'll hold off for myself and wait to see how they deal with it going forward (ugh i hate that phrase). My hubby's enjoying it well enough, but we're already both playing WoW and GW on a regular basis.

Offtopic, RF Online went F2P in the last couple of weeks, I got this when it first came out (in the UK) and hated the grinding, so someone recommended GW to me. 2000+ hours of play later I'm still playing GW, quite happily. I went back and rolled a new toon in RFO and YeGads.. it's horrible. Played ten minutes and uninstalled. >.<

nothing more to say.

The posters on that games websites all must enjoy wasting their time.

For once I agree with you completely.

I don't play games that don't allow respecing.

It makes no sense (to me) that a company be able to change the nature of skills, but players can not respec in reaction.

I tried HG:L. Boring and ugly. And the lack of respecs crosses it off my list for good.

It's an interesting argument:

On one hand; the game is an RPG, you create a character, and thus, should you not live with the choices that your character has made? Like the sex, appereance, name and class of your character?
But then again, like in real life, it's never to late to change profession, and get other skills, and learn other stuff, while we forget the stuff we don't use.

Then on the other hand; Don't GWs enemies have such variaty and complex system, that making a build, no matter which it is, will be bad against certain types of foes and encounters to the point of game breaking? I think we all have tried that in GW, that we have entered a mission with a build that was a disaster for the enemies in them.
WoW and HGL don't have this problem, as they are much easier game, and rely on much looser mathmathics, while GW is designed to the bone with fixed max stats on weapons and abillities. I mean... GW is about choice right?


I think that I would love to have more permenent choices for the characters to make, to make them able to deffiantiate(spelling?) themselfs from other characters, but these could be many other things!

I'll go even further:

The future of MMORPGs is flexible classes. Being able to change your characters class (or profession) will be an important feature of future MMORPGs. (just look at Tabula Rasa's clone system for inspiration...)

So, but, how does the item system work for this flexible class system? Because if you've never played that class before, I'm guessing you dont have the armor or weapons or whatever else you need to play it right.

Q F T.

I hated the att refund system, when they removed it it opened up a whole host of new options for builds (you mean I can try an element other than fire on my ele?!? Awesome!) My necro could go mm or curses, my ele a spiker or nuke, my monk could go heal with my guildies or smite solo...you get the idea. When they added templates I was very happy, bye bye build notes!

i personally like the semi permenant class choice in guild wars, i think its strikes a good balance between permenant and flexible class choices as it lets your character have a sense of identity but still allows enough freedom gameplay wise

What i would like to see more flexibilty is in the role playing and pve content in the game, i.e. different routes can take to the same conclusion, different outcomes for a certain poin in the game story, different quests that depend on past choices made, more factions to befriend and make your enemy, more ways to interact with the enviroment, npc's, game story etc

the free respecing in gw is definately a big plus for me, it saves so much time and prevents unneccasery anguish and boredom of having to build a character up again [low lvl limit also helps]

I think ChroystmoBot;304548 is totally right, wammos are indestructible V_V. Its not like a mesmer can just destroy our whole adrel and energy bar. Or an ele using an AoE build...

I am a main wammo though. We rock, but we have lots of flaws, although we can soak up lots of damage.

...unless the game has changed drastically after GWEN, I think the main point of being a W/Mo is to be hard to kill, and so NOT damage-dealing (which should be W/E or W/N or W/whatever).

EA is always pulling shit like this, which is a big turn-off to any of their games altogether.
Which is one of the reasons why I'm on the wall about going back to it, I like how easy it is to change characters on Guild Wars, but having to shift around gear through 9 characters gets really old, really fast. I would have rather had one character that could change classes in-town, or something to that affect.
That, and FFXI has an auction house and a supreme search feature...

Before anyone says respeccing sucks, let me remind you why one of the main reasons everyone was playing fire magic exclusively.

If you want to change something about your character but you don't have the appropriate items to use after the change has been made, there's only one solution: You don't change.

If you want to change, you should've collected the items to use to begin with. Isn't that true for GW as well? I know it's not that much of a problem due to how easy the game is and how crafted weapons are readily available. But you still don't want to switch to swordsmanship from axe mastery without having a good sword with you, right?

The same thing applies in current WoW as well, since some classes can play 3 different roles and would want to have 3 different armor/weapon sets also.