Update - Thursday, July 7, 2011

didnt bother after 2 quests, repetitive, no thinking involved, just pure boringness.

As stated the quests get better as you go, but whatever. Short attention spans.

Yes, because killing large afflicted is somehow more interesting than small afflicted =]

I'm actually quite surprised at how terrible the new content is...

You're more likely to fail; that counts for at least something.
Having to do it repeatedly across loads of quests is somewhat nauseating though.

Did 3.... Might just wait for some new content now, hahaha.

1quest to go, the kappa hm(i seem to be bad at it!)

What Waits in Shadow (The last quest of the story arc)... Is sooo QQ. I mean, I was able to do it on my first go, but it's literally forcing you to decimate the Am Fah in Dragons Throat. There is no exploring, there's only 1 entrance to the next rooms.
Tip: Don't bring an MM... Epic pulls are epic.

Regarding the content as a whole, I wasn't expecting much to be honest, this is only stage one of WoC and it was probably implemented just to wet our appetite, introduce us to the Ministry and their "vision". I'll agree that the missions before you go to Minister Cho's Estate were incredibly droll, but how else can Anet create quests that correctly portray what the Ministry are doing? The Ministry were slowly eradicating the Afflicted, and the only way was to fight them in most areas of Kaineng City. There's no other way around that type of story.

I won't be doing the HM quests either. Nor will I trade my commendations for a purple weapon. I'd rather save them and hope for better rewards in stage two. See ya then :3

A better tip would be 'bring an MM and pull from far away'.

Well obviously. That's what I did, but it meant for a longer time if you have to lure groups to eventually seperate them. The aggro even in NM is very high so backpedalling takes a fair amount of time to eventually split the groups up. Especially if you have to do this with every room. The only decent thing is that the Am Fah have no cripples, so running away isn't a problem. Just the aggro. It felt like the longest quest out of all of them (longer than Zen Daijun) because of this. And it probably was too, must have taken me 25/30 minutes

The problem also lies in the minions. As everyone knows, they're always set on aggressive, so if you don't want to push into the backline of a group in fear of aggroing more, the minions will do it for you (even if you pull them further back, minions will carry on their dirty work).

The question is whether you're willing to constantly pull and seperate teams, to the extent of running all the way back to the previous room... Every time. I'd actually agree because you need a meat shield against these people. But it's such a bother to seperate groups within such a small room each time...

Is there a point to doing the hm quests other than to get more rewards? I tried to ask people in game, but they give some interesting answers that maybe aren't too reliable, so maybe the community can help lol

I kinda quit this quest, it's not that hard like you said. it's just so boring. pull, kill, pull some more and kill. I run through most HM vq-s harder than this overaggro hell.

Short attention spans eh? I went for gwamm and full HoM so I highly doubt that I have a short attention span. If you want to drag me into a good quest line at least start it off fun not go slay this mob 50 times but in different zones and add a few bosses with the mob. I went on wiki and checked how many of these cleansing quests I had to do and I seen over 8 and said there is no point going any further. Yes I know this content was free but this is just my opinion on it.

the only two reasons i can think of is to be ables to do that zone in hm without those afflected stuff in it and the rewards. but thats all i can think of unless someone else here knows? plus is it me or does this herald we told to seek out is coming in part 2?

Not all the "cleansing" quests are the same, just fyi. I'm a little annoyed at the quest design too, but it really is pretty standard GW fare; almost all quests in this game (WiK included) are either "kill all of these mobs" or "get to this point, kill mobs along the way if necessary". The "interesting" WiK quests didn't really come until later in the content. I'm hopeful the same will hold true here....and it's possible that you won't be able to continue if you don't finish this content.

I finisheshed em all off. Factions should be better for melee characters now.

For anyone complaining about quests that are about killing things, here is a summary of all missions in the game:

Go here, kill this missions: 57
Do something else missions: 1

OMG GUILDWARS SUCKS ALL YOU DO IS KILL THINGS!

Most of the clensing quests are an incredibly quick kill 3 mobs and you are donedeal, you can finish the first half of the them in the time it takes to do a single prophecies or nightfall holyshitthistakeforever mission. And they DO mix it up quite a bit after the first few quests, though the bosses are IMO a bit disappointing (final clensing mission being way too easy).

A betterer tip would be 'bring multiple MMs and pull everything at once'! At least, in NM that is. In HM more then 2 groups is probably a bad idea. Which is only a better reason to do it!

That mission did drag on a bit longer than it should have though. I suppose that may just be to better emphasize the ending *spoiler*. I wonder if the change referenced in Reisen's final dialogue from not *spoiler* will turn out to affect stuff later in WoC.

Keep doing the quests it gets more fun. And HM is pretty challenging, if thats your thing.

Doing a couple quests and calling it quits is not grounds to judge the entire chapter. Like everything else in GW you have to put in your time to get the good stuff. This is only the beginning.

And we seem to be missing a few quests in this first chapter, so I'm hoping we get to see those soon. If the pace keeps up it could be alot of fun.

Love how the last quest starts off with the comment, "We should try to avoid fighting."

Good luck with that!

Have yet to make up my mind on the purple weapons as of yet. They could be a good thing if the min-commadations are not needed for future rewards. I have some hopes that we will see both Green and Gold weapons in the next two chapters.

In normal mode most all of the quests are very tough on melee, wars especially! However for an all caster party they seem almost too easy.

WiK had a lot of grouping. This has less grouping with a lot of quests at once and NM/HM variations. If I were to ever be asked which I had the most fun with, I'd go with WiK.

Hard mode of Courier Falken's quest gives a lot of loot, I gotta admit, but it's nowhere near as fun for me as the normal mode.. normal mode you can brawl to your heart's content, you might fall down a few times, but you'll take down 2-3 out of a pull of 6 before they bring you down..

Hard mode.. both you and Falken gotta be full health at the start of every pull, you gotta let him tank at least 2 out of a pull of 3+ while you kill things one at a time, cause if you get more than 2 attacking you they blow you up in under 4s. Is it doable? Yeah. Is it fun to constantly run away from fights and take them out 1 at a time after Falken reses? No.

Pull of 2? Easy, Pull of 3, pretty hard but doable, pull of 4? You're probably gonna need to sacrifice him once and get in 1 kill to reduce it to a 3 pull then run away. Pull of over 4? Tedious 1 kill at a time then run away unless you pick a target he's not fighting and after killing your one it's weak enough to finish off, then run away.

I'm going to be frank.

WiK may have come in bits and pieces, and with less quests than WoC, but it feels more developed. Stuff happens in Kryta, roadblocks, minor encounters where common folk are threatened, new opponents, etc. All of this happening around our characters while we were doing new stuff in Kryta.

WoC on the other hand... I do believe it has some interesting things going for it, but I'm not seeing them. So the world changes after we cleanse some places. Who cares? I have no interest in going around random explorables to see if something interesting might pop up. Show the interesting things while we're doing these quests, not afterward. I've not seen a single of the many post-cleansing encounters, I had to read them on the wiki.

The quests themselves are somewhat challenging, if a little repetitive, but not nearly as interesting as the WiK quests. We're killing the same monsters/gangs as we've always killed in Factions. New builds be damned, it doesn't feel fresh. The imperial quests are the better ones, it's a shame they're so badly outnumbered by the ministerial ones.

Now, the nature and content of the quests may be dictated by the story of the rise and eventual corruption of the Ministry of Purity, I get that. Knowing that doesn't make the experience better though. Here's hoping parts 2 and 3 are more engaging.

I'm having fun with WoC part 1.

WiK was before the 7 hero update, too.

Really, the WoC quests aren't bad. But there is less dialogue than in WiK. Also, WiK was released in stages, while WoC got released at once. As a player's reflex is to instantly do everything, people bite off more than they can chew, and that's why people find the quests monotonous - they do too many at the same time.

/signed

I've been doing the WoC quests interspersed with finishing off VQ s and some Proph HM missions that I never quite got round to bothering with. Makes it a lot more bearable if you come at it in small bites.

For Cho's I ran my standard 4 man build of me (R/A AP EVA Spam) Gwen (M/Rt Panic Resto) Olias (N/Mo AoTL Prot MM) and Xandra (Rt/any SoS Resto). No problems in NM. Haven't tried it in HM yet.

Nice to see Kaineng filled with people again. It's been tumbleweed city for years.

Again, the difficulty curve seems to be a huge problem when releasing a storyline. When you look at the quests they hand out and think to yourself, "Ugh, how many more groups of guys do I have to kill before some NPC says a couple of lines to advance the plot." It SHOULD be a steamroll (even WiK was easy because of the open areas and random PvP builds it threw at us) not a meta-counter. Oh, haha, you figured out that everyone with heroes runs sabway! Good one, Anet!

Monotony isn't that much of an issue; it's how the plot and quests are revealed to us that leaves us bored. Yes, lots of people wanted not to wait a long time to get each part of the story, but releasing 17 quests of "hey, look how we revolutionized this never-used piece of area" and "oh, you want plot? better not wipe to meta-builds and horrible escort missions!" at once without a lot of story development is a mistake.

Really, what did we get from 20 quests? We learned that the guys in all white armor plan to rid the entire world of evil, any means necessary, and are quickly turning out to be glorified Nazis. We get to see that GANGS ARE PEOPLE TOO! (even though we have had no problems killing multiple bandits, armies of religious folk, two separate factions, a nation of dwarfs, feline that we took homes away from in the first place, pirates, centaurs, and an entire military blindly working for a god-hungry commander...) but I feel no remorse from them because I have a history with them myself and gang culture is a culture that is often looked down upon for good reason.

We also see that the Afflicted are either getting smarter or a greater force is directing them, or that they are getting their minds back (they ARE simply very sick and ill humans, after all). The Imperial army seems to distrust the Ministry of Nazis from the get-go and continuously note their incompetence. And the people of Cantha are split between their thoughts on the Ministry and Empire.

Oh, and there are scavengers, too. Whoop-de-doo.

What did we get from WiK? Espionage action, more characters being thrown into the mix, dynamic quests (courier), fascist vs rebels, huger threats, and one of the most iconic enemies in the game, the Mursaats. Couple this with relationships, allies from nowhere, and interesting quests every so often, and you get the recipe for a popular storyline.

WoC, so far, hasn't covered a lot of ground for the work we've been doing. The first 6 Cleansing quests, and we get an initiate who has some backstory and insight as the why he is who he is, and a new boss-like foe. 3 more, and we see how the Afflicted are affecting the Island and Mainland more than ever. 5 more, and we get thrown the idea that the gangs might be behind it, and we have to do something to stop it. A couple more, and we learn the Ministry's true intentions: Ultimate Purification of every faction out in the world.

At this point, the story WILL get more interesting as there will be a lot more factions to consider who we will be siding with to stop whomever, as opposed to WiK where it was just 1v1. Am Fah, Jade Bros., Afflicted, Nazis, Empire, even the Outcasts might have something to say about this one.

Just, hang in there

Mowing down jade brotherhood by the millions was fun. I never liked em anyway.

I'll let you in on a secret. GW got so successful not because it makes you kill mobs, but because it makes you forget you have to.

Yeah, most MMORPG's around are (sadly) still hack'n'slash at their core when you get down to it. But at least GW [used to] offer stuff that made up for it.

WoC, so far, starts off as too much slaughter and too little else. It tends to get old pretty fast.

And you'd technically be wrong. It makes me wonder, though, why finishing Factions is listed as the only WoC requirement, although WoC is clearly not doable with just Factions and seems to have been balanced and aimed at the hardcore player. Not only that, but the difficulty is forced even on NM, not kept only for those willing and able to do HM.

WoC was supposed to be new content, meant to renew interest in as many players as possible. But instead it caters to a small minority who hadn't left anyway.

Which puzzles me to no end every time I see it done -- why on Earth does NCSoft think that is their most valuable player base? Have they completely forgot everything that made GW a success? I wonder if it ever occured to them that the hardcore people are the most unlikely to switch to a completely different type of game, which GW2 will be...

Espionage action? You mean Dinas said something to us that didn't change anything? Sure, he spied but there was no action, it was just some dude delivering an inconsequential line of dialogue to move the plot (lol plot for WiK) ALONG.

More characters? Of course. WiK was packed with characters. Not a single one of them was as interesting, complex and likeable as the story and character development happening with WoC - and it's only part one (especially when you read the random encounters and start thinking about how the Yuudachi family, Ashu, Reiko and Miku are all going to fit into the story). I know very little about Salma (aside from the fact that she likes to let other people do the work for her because she is the lost love child of the previous cowardly monarch). Already the backstory of Miku and Ashu is a lot more interesting than Salma (the main character of WiK) and most of it is a mystery. We don't know much about Evennia, Livia or Bartholos - they are proud Krytan's who want to save their people, but do we know much more than that? Their motivations? What drives them? Their histories? Don't get me started on how horrible Gwen was as a character in everything she did after Eye of the North finished (I went from loving her after EotN to absolutely despising her during WiK and HotN).

I'll hand it to you, the mursaat are a very popular GW1 enemy race, but I never understood the love. Honestly, WiK felt like one of those fights where they bring out a has-been-champion out from retirement just to milk a little bit more money from to sell some pay per views when he takes on a much younger opponent who simply outclasses him. The mursaat truly lost relevance at the end of Prophecies - they were gone. One made a cameo in EotN but for the most part the race was gone from Tyria. They had played their part, their story was over and it was time to move on. Instead they were recylced and ended up as the weakest plot device and quest chain to be part of a main story arch in GW. Why did we go from killing forts full of them like it was no big deal to making a huge deal about a handfull of lingering spell casters? It simply didn't make sense from a plot perspective. The afflicted was an unfinished conflict. It was still very much incredibly relevant to Cantha and Tyria. They were still plaguing the city and eating away at the Canthan populating. A far bigger threat than anything that exhisted in the WiK. They also acted as a very believable launching point for the new organisation the Ministry of Purity. That's a great plot development which not only advances the story but fleshes out the people in the form of Initiate Zei Ri who has his own character develop through the cleansing quests to show where the Ministry came from and why these ordinary people do what they do. WiK can't hold a candle to that.

I personally didn't think any of the other WiK quests were interesting, in any way that was different from most of GW. I think the only two quests which didn't essential act as bounties were the escort one (wow I ran across a map, wow I ran across a map again, that's great!) and the Battle for Lion's Arch (which was a very good quest and basically the only real interesting meaty piece in the entire WiK. So far WoC has had a bunch of kill quests, a defend against masses quest, invade a packed base quest, rescue the survivors quest (especially on HM) an escort quest with a twist (the drakes) and boxing couriers (way better than the nerfed the hell Falken "quest" from WiK). Almost all of WiK boils down to travel here to see dialogue, zone and repeat, from there it's just a tonne of boss bounties. Even the mursaat quests were just boss bounties. The inclusion of the asura was a nice plot point but every representation of them in gameplay mechanics was bloody terrible and just made me angry (those becons were not play tested - hero/hench got 1/8th of their effectiveness and every martial class was severely gimpled by their mundane exhistence).

I enjoyed WiK for what it was but I honestly think some people might like it more for the flavour and love of Kryta/Prophecies rather than it's gameplay because from what I've seen of the one third of WoC I've played so far, it's leaving WiK in the dust in every way I can compare them. I'll admit it starts out slow with the cleansing quests (which I did personally enjoy and I also think had important character and plot development to understanding the real issues developing here) but so far it's shaping up to be a far more complex story than what we got in WiK and an honest attempt to move away from boss bounties as the only kinds of gameplay they give us.

I've seen hardly any reference to Ashu and that Yuudachi family at all, and I've done all the quests. I'll have to take your word for it that these characters are interesting.

I'm not going to randomly wander about explorables hoping to come across random stuff. If that's how the 'greater' WoC story is to be presented, I'm not interested. Take quest, map travel, go outside and kill. That's WoC for me, and there's been nothing interesting along the way so far.

Well it was only part one. They intended to release WoC in three cohesive parts so the story was likely split into three cohesive parts to account for that. There was probably very little for the major characters to do in part one (it's mostly a prologue introducing the conflicts and setting the scene for what's to come) so I personally expect part two to be a lot more character driven than part one was.

Having said that, it won't take much to have better character development than WiK. The only characters they bothered to work on there were Gwen and Keiran, and that was sickening. WoC has already been vastly superior with Zei Ri and it should only get better when we see Miku return as a major player.

I was hoping that the WoC content would contain a few things that would make Cantha a better place to explore, such as being able to enter mission explorables from the mission outpost, and being able to enter Viz Square local and foreign quarters regardless or whether your character is local or foreign. I liked that one of the quests opened up the Nahpui Quarter mission for exploration, and I hope that the later sections open up Viz Square for exploration.

As for the actual content, it was ok. A bit repetitive, but it was good to see some more challenging skill bars, and I'm glad they finally did the costumes properly (no AA problems).

First I was thinking, hey ANet is giving us free content and they include costumes to pay their bills on the way. Now I think, ANet is selling costumes and adding content along the way so people don't complain.

The first part was disappointing and I don't see how anyone used any creativity at all creating this. Hopefully parts 2 & 3 are better.

No it wasn't, it was released piece by piece, and by piece by piece, we're talking every couple weeks there was a new DIALOG piece that was required to proceed with the questline. There wasn't even quests or anything, just run to the shining blade camp, watch a dialog, then you're done, next week, go watch Zinn's Trial outside Rata Summ, you're done, couple weeks later, go back to shining blade camp, watch another dialog, done, couple weeks later go to eye of the north and step outside, watch Dialog, do.. OH Now we have daily bounties, okay, do daily bounties. Couple weeks later, first quest, individual bounties for inquisitors.

But yeah, it was released piece by piece but frequently.

Only problem here is while we're releasing bigger chunks it also seems like they're spacing it out further apart too. So while I'm about done with Winds of Change on 1 character, just polishing up hard modes, they won't release the second part of it for months to come. Probably around September.

Wow, it's harsh being an Assassin and doing the low party quests in HM. I end up dying about 5-6 times in like a 20 second period with 60dp.

For some reason I can't seem to get the last 3 quests in HM from the person in Keineng to show. I've finished all the other quests, and the previous quests in HM as well.

That's because you have to talk to Xan Hei to get the next quests. He's in Xaquang Skyway.

I've already completed all the quests he offers as well.

Seeking confirmation from others who know about this issue. It's damn annoying and puts me off from buying costumes in general. This might make me reconsider. (Also - need to be sure it's not just getting lost in the default white dye...)

You could always enter both foreign and local quarter and the vizunah square mission is the only area that doesn't have an accessible explorable area. Naphui Quarter's explorable is accessed through Senji's Corner.

One of the first things I did when I saw someone with these costumes in Kaineng was check them out on 2x and 4x AA. Fortunately there was someone else there with the Balthazar costume for comparison, and it was obvious that the new costumes have been done properly. The purity costume looks really good dyed green and blue.

You can only enter the opposite quarter if you have someone else in the party doing the quest that leads them to that quarter. My rit ran through undercity doing the cleanse undercity quest with a player running a prophecies warrior, and the entrance to local quarter was blocked to us (both of us have completed Factions). We shouldn't have to rely on finding another player with the relevant quest to get access to these outposts. It would also be nice to be able to enter Viz Square as an explorable unhindered for cartography purposes, such as Divinity Coast for example in WiK.

Nahpui Quarter explorable is different to Nahpui Quarter mission. Doing the WoC quest for Nahpui Quarter opens access to the mission part, via the explorable part.