My BIG LIST of things that SUCK about Guild Wars

[Saint_Proverbius]

In answer to all the hype from certain people on this forum, here's my big list of things they didn't mention:

• Mouse commands totally override keyboard control. So, if you click the mouse, you better be damned sure you really want to do that, because otherwise you're going to have to click on the ground at your feet to stop moving. This also happens in combat at times. It's good clean fun to be attempting to run away with the keyboard steering only to find you can't move!
• The map sucks. There's no listing of much of anything on the map other than red, green, and blue blips for the compass and town locations for the big map. Where's the names of areas? Where's the icons on the compass map to tell you which green blips are merchants versus the other green blips that are just meaningless townspeople or hirelings? Where's a special indicator for NPCs that are giving out quests at least?
• The world is a maze. It really is. Navigating around the world is a pain, especially the first time you move through an area. Most areas consist of a few open spots and a whole lot of twisting pathways connecting them. What's even better is there are a lot of places you can't cross even though you've crossed similar terrain elsewhere. It's not always the case of a consistant steepness of hill being impassable.
• The missions are totally gay. They're horrendously long with no saving during them. So, if you have a mission that takes about an hour, and your party croaks near the end of it - YOU GET TO DO IT ALL OVER AGAIN! Croaking isn't the only way to lose missions, though. Often there are fun objectives, like escort Prince Rurik who seems to like to run in to the middle of packs of beasts who rip him to shreads. He dies, you lose, and get to do it all over again.
• Boss critters who drop NOTHING! That's right, you can have a big, bad glowing boss critter out there with gobs of special powers, spells, and so on. You kill him, which can be tough when he can heal himself over and over again, and often you get NOTHING! No drops happens quite a bit. When they do drop, you're often treated to something like a salvage item rather than anything remotely interesting.
• Healing critter stalemates! Occationally your party will run across a pack of critters who can heal. Sometimes, there's a large enough pack of them with group healing ability. That's great, because that means unless your party can deal massive super damage, you end up with a stalemate. You can kill wacking on them and they can keep wacking on you, but since you've got a decent monk, and they're all healing each other constantly, neither side can win. There are cases where you have a bunch of healing critters that are surrounding a boss healing critter. That's peachy fun!
• Crafting is lame. It's lame because you can't do it. You have to pay to have it done by NPCs! You have to salvage items you find in order to get components, right? Then you have to pay NPCs to make new items for you. So, not only do you have to buy salvage kits to break items down, and they only have a limited amount of uses, but you also get to pay more money to have the new items made. I haven't seen anyone sell armor, either. I haven't seen any armor drop yet, other than shields. So far, if you want armor, you have to salvage and pay to have it made. Well, you can also buy components from certain merchants, but that costs a lot more.
• Death penalty fun. When you die, you have consequences, naturally. However, Guild Wars' idea of consequences is you get less mana and hit points until you kill enough creatures that your morale makes up for it. The penalty is pretty steep, too. A good death can result in a loss of over 20% of your mana and hit points. Morale goes up really slowly too. If you die a few times during a mission, you're useless to the party after that. You might as well quit, which screws the party over depending on your role.. Your healer died a few time? He quits. You're hosed. Hooray!
• No way to replace people who leave the party. If someone has to leave during the middle of one of those way too long missions, or died a few times and has a death penalty in the 50s mark, there's no way to swap in another player or even an NPC hireling. You can push on with the mission, but you're pretty screwed at that point. Did I mention how painfully long those missions can be?

Welp, I'm tired, so bedtime. That's long enough for now.

 

[Sol Invictus]

In answer to all the hype from certain people on this forum, here's my big list of things they didn't mention:

• Mouse commands totally override keyboard control. So, if you click the mouse, you better be damned sure you really want to do that, because otherwise you're going to have to click on the ground at your feet to stop moving. This also happens in combat at times. It's good clean fun to be attempting to run away with the keyboard steering only to find you can't move!

• 
  You can disable 'mouse click to move' in the control options.
  
  

  [*] The missions are totally gay. They're horrendously long with no saving during them. So, if you have a mission that takes about an hour, and your party croaks near the end of it - YOU GET TO DO IT ALL OVER AGAIN! Croaking isn't the only way to lose missions, though. Often there are fun objectives, like escort Prince Rurik who seems to like to run in to the middle of packs of beasts who rip him to shreads. He dies, you lose, and get to do it all over again.

  Actually they really fixed that up since beta. You haven't been playing the missions so you don't know what the new Rurik is like. He actually follows you now instead of going ahead without you.
  
  

  [*] Boss critters who drop NOTHING! That's right, you can have a big, bad glowing boss critter out there with gobs of special powers, spells, and so on. You kill him, which can be tough when he can heal himself over and over again, and often you get NOTHING! No drops happens quite a bit. When they do drop, you're often treated to something like a salvage item rather than anything remotely interesting.

  You can capture his elite skills that you can't get anywhere else. I'd call that 'remotely' interesting.
  
  I agree with the rest. They're issues that can be worked on, especially the NPC indicator thing or people dropping from parties (they should be replaced with henchmen). As for NPC indicators, you can see a 'furry' large green blip on your radar now to indicate a quest objective location. That wasn't in beta.

 

[xemous]

Hmmm looks like i was right - as usual. GW is a steaming pile of dog shit. Thanks for clearing it up, not like i was going to buy it anyway.

 

[Astromarine]

then again, with Ex's clarifications, it looks like you were, in fact, wrong - as usual.

 

[xemous]

Just because you pre-ordered it like a moron.

 

[Balor]

Crafting is lame. It's lame because you can't do it. You have to pay to have it done by NPCs! You have to salvage items you find in order to get components, right? Then you have to pay NPCs to make new items for you. So, not only do you have to buy salvage kits to break items down, and they only have a limited amount of uses, but you also get to pay more money to have the new items made. I haven't seen anyone sell armor, either. I haven't seen any armor drop yet, other than shields. So far, if you want armor, you have to salvage and pay to have it made. Well, you can also buy components from certain merchants, but that costs a lot more.

Hey, I'd say it's a nice feature.
First, to make good armor and weapons you must study for years, and that's boring, repeative work... *remembers one of recent issues of The Noob comics*
Next, armor that is 'dropped' is unlikely to fit you at all, expecially plate mail.
All in all, it does not sound so sucky.

 

[Shagnak]

stuff from Mr Saint

Hahaha.

Actually, the game IS far from perfect, but , hey it is still a lot of fun as far as I'm concerned. And pretty good value for money. The world appears to be BIG++

As for hype? Hmmmm...not as pervasive as you are making it out to be.
Well, Exitium/Sol/woteva was doing maximum pimpage before release, sure.
I was cynical as fuck (as were a lot of others), but still bought it. And now I'm enjoying it more than I would a MMORPG-style online game.

I agree with some of your points. But some of them are result of you being (apparently) crap. I (and PennyAnte, amongst others) was there to witness some of your dumb-ass-ness, remember? "Resistence to trying shit out and working out crap" is apparently very high on your CV.
It's late over here, and I've been drinking (aaaargh), so I'm gonna reply to some of your others (and Sols) in the morn. It's going to be hard to not sound like I'm a big GW gimp, but, oh well.

DL should be turning up soon, which will no doubt swing your cross-eyes elsewhere.

Toodles!

Edit: Nice title :wink:
YOU R TEH UBAR TROLL

 

[dipdipdip]

[*] Death penalty fun. When you die, you have consequences, naturally. However, Guild Wars' idea of consequences is you get less mana and hit points until you kill enough creatures that your morale makes up for it. The penalty is pretty steep, too. A good death can result in a loss of over 20% of your mana and hit points. Morale goes up really slowly too. If you die a few times during a mission, you're useless to the party after that. You might as well quit, which screws the party over depending on your role.. Your healer died a few time? He quits. You're hosed. Hooray!

In my experience, if you go back into town, the penalty instantly disappears. I'm only level four, so maybe this only works at the earlier levels?

 

[Shagnak]

In my experience, if you go back into town, the penalty instantly disappears. I'm only level four, so maybe this only works at the earlier levels?

No, it works through the entire game. The downside of this, though, is that you will have to re-clear monsters out of "instances".
Pretty reasonable for failure if you ask me.

...sleep...

 

[PennyAnte]

Wow, You're talking crazy Saint. Some of this is flat-out wrong.

Mouse commands totally override keyboard control.

No they don't. To test it, I just clicked to move with the mouse, then hit E to turn off and S to stop/back up and did. So this = a FACTUAL ERROR.

The map sucks. There's no listing of much of anything on the map other than red, green, and blue blips for the compass and town locations for the big map.

Wow, you want absolutely everything handed to you on a silver platter, utter handholding of the player? I would never have expected this from you. THAT'S WHY IT'S CALLED EXPLORATION! There's lots of cool stuff out there for you to find. What do you want, a game totally on rails with GO HERE printed on a big arrow all the time? That's kiddy consolized garbage.

I'd like to maybe see the ability to "pin" up map notes once I do find something, like a collector, but that's a feature they could stream in like tomorrow. Very minor. Besides, fan sites will probably take it upon themselves to work this kind of stuff into guides, if nothing else. Some fan sites already have zoomable maps with all the cities. NPCs are a matter of time.

The world is a maze. It really is. Navigating around the world is a pain, especially the first time you move through an area. Most areas consist of a few open spots and a whole lot of twisting pathways connecting them.

A lot of that is in mountainous areas. I've been in plenty of open fields that balance this out. On the whole it is a bit twisty, yes, but there is more than enough freedom to satisfy me. They've made great maps given the need to make the game run on many different systems.

The missions are totally gay. They're horrendously long with no saving during them. So, if you have a mission that takes about an hour, and your party croaks near the end of it - YOU GET TO DO IT ALL OVER AGAIN! Croaking isn't the only way to lose missions, though. Often there are fun objectives, like escort Prince Rurik who seems to like to run in to the middle of packs of beasts who rip him to shreads. He dies, you lose, and get to do it all over again.

NPC escorts are always the hardest in any game. But apart from that, you realize what you're asking for is the ability to Save/Load through ALL your mistakes, and various types of player handholding that would dumb the game down so much it might as well be Dungeon Siege.

Besides, this only happens in the main missions. Otherwise you just resurrect, and the monsters you killed stay dead.

Healing critter stalemates! Occationally your party will run across a pack of critters who can heal. Sometimes, there's a large enough pack of them with group healing ability. That's great, because that means unless your party can deal massive super damage, you end up with a stalemate.

OH MY GOD SO ATTACK THE HEALER FIRST!!! That's just tactics!! WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?

*Throws dishes, pans and household utensils at you*

Jeezis, I almost ALWAYS attack any kind of caster first. A group of developers come up with a game where casters are more relevant than magic missile x10 AND YOU COMPLAIN? That's OBNOXIOUS.

Besides, there are plenty of caster-shutdown skills, like energy burn, and even anti-healer skills that damage healers who heal and reduce the overall effectiveness of healing.

It's like you're not even playing the game before you bash it. Go with a balanced party next time, or use a better build, or better tactics, yourself.

Crafting is lame. It's lame because you can't do it. You have to pay to have it done by NPCs! You have to salvage items you find in order to get components, right? Then you have to pay NPCs to make new items for you.

I see. So you would rather have another player skill for crafting that has to be "treadmilled" and maybe isn't even accessible to every character class. Brilliant.

And salvage kits are now less than half price (40 g not 100g). But even if they weren't it's good for the game to have a few money sinks so gold stays valuable. I'm not sure it is staying valuable yet all the way into the late game, but at least it is through about level 15.

Death penalty fun. When you die, you have consequences, naturally. However, Guild Wars' idea of consequences is you get less mana and hit points until you kill enough creatures that your morale makes up for it. The penalty is pretty steep, too. A good death can result in a loss of over 20% of your mana and hit points.

So I guess what's better is either:
1. A character gets entirely shunted out of the mission immediately, for "dying," or
2. there's no consequence for death at all?
Give me a break.

No way to replace people who leave the party. If someone has to leave during the middle of one of those way too long missions, or died a few times and has a death penalty in the 50s mark, there's no way to swap in another player or even an NPC hireling.

Yeah, too bad there's that whole thing about being a single squad deep in enemy territory, with just one chance to get it right. I had one group where we lost almost everyone, and one skilled player coached the sole survivor with clever tactics to try to do the final objectives. It *almost* worked, and the fact that it ultimately failed made it feel no less like a valiant effort. It still went down in my memory as a fantastic effort.

Sounds to me like you're stomping your foot and pouting, along the lines of "WAAAH, I DON'T ALWAYS WIN!!" Don't be a brat, Saint.

Granted, I'm a huge fangurl who has been playing so much since it came out I've hardly posted here since it did, (yes, I'm still working and everything, no snide comments) but it's a great game that has me hooked. I'm enjoying the heck out of it. It has the perfect balance of what I want in an MMO while taking away what I don't, and the perfect balance of what I want from a single-player experience, while taking away what I don't.

Guild Wars is wonderful. You sound like you're just being cranky.

 

[Sol Invictus]

I think the problem with the two monks healing each other (we encountered this earlier) was that Saint didn't have any interrupt abilities to counter them from healing themselves. I had Backfire and such, but I can't concentrate on two characters at once.

Yeah, too bad there's that whole thing about being a single squad deep in enemy territory, with just one chance to get it right. I had one group where we lost almost everyone, and one skilled player coached the sole survivor with clever tactics to try to do the final objectives. It *almost* worked, and the fact that it ultimately failed made it feel no less like a valiant effort. It still went down in my memory as a fantastic effort.

Oh yeah, speaking of tactics, I also managed to do that long Ruins of Surmia quest with only two people. It's a quest most people fail, because you have to *cough* lead Rurik around. We started out with a team of four, even had a good monk, but his connection disconnected mid-game and some guy wanted to do the bonus quest, but we botched it, so he quit because he was a lamer. The remaining ranger and myself (a mesmer) managed to control the hordes and won the game without dying a single time. It was a pretty hard quest, too - but with the right tactics, anything is possible.

By the way, I never said I agreed with Saint's little rant, I only agree with the issues he had about the GUI. Some of the map indicators could use a little work.

I think Saint's problem is that he doesn't like to socialize with the riff raff in Guild Wars. The game is really goddamn fun when you party up with people, strangers or whatever, to do quests. They don't have to be instances at all.

 

[Sol Invictus]

Let me put it in simple terms:
Soloing is masturbation. Partying up is having a group orgy - lots more fun.

 

[merry andrew]

Let me put it in simple terms:
Soloing is masturbation. Partying up is having a group orgy - lots more fun.

The wonderful thing is that you can get off either way.

 

[jiujitsu]

Saint is just trying to cause conflict.

 

[Volourn]

Only what? A dozen bad points accoridng to Saint? That's pretty impressive - even the great games like FO, BG, and PST have more. :shock:

Anyways, let me see now, no pay per month for Guild Wars, the quests sound better than most MMORPGs, and seeing Saint whine like a little crybaby that a game is too ahrd; it almost makes makes the game worth purchasing just to reward them for that last part.

How is the rules system? Is it good? Races, classes,a dn abilties? Might have to do some research me thinks. The graphics do look good; but hten again; that's pretty much true for many games nowadays..

 

[PennyAnte]

OMG Volourn, the rules system is great. There is an amazing variety of possible builds, about 150 skills per character that can be mixed and matched for combos.

The best part is that they can be mixed and matched at will - you have a skill bar with eight slots and you can swap any eight you've unlocked for each mission. Also, you can swap attribute points around relatively easily, so you never have to delete an entire character for choosing to say, focus in axes and later deciding you like swords better.

There's about five character classes and 75 skills each, and all the classes can be combined with eachother, two per character. So the variety is incredible.

I have a ranger necromancer who can be kind of a zookeeper with an army of minions on one mission, then a crack archer that uses curses to cause massive damage per shot on the next mission. Totally different play styles, all based on what skills I've unlocked and how I tactically decide to use them.

Plus, if you get the game, you get an invite to the Codex guild and you get to chat with yours truly in REAL TIME - that's the best part, lol.

 

[Volourn]

Yeha, I just read an IGN fax. Sounds cool - espicially the secondary class thing.


"Plus, if you get the game, you get an invite to the Codex guild and you get to chat with yours truly in REAL TIME - that's the best part, lol."

Hahaha. I doubt the Codex can handle me in RT. Most people in RL surely can't. :D

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

You can disable 'mouse click to move' in the control options.

I would disable it, but occationally clicking to target a monster does it as well. The only way to actually get the player moving again is to click on the ground and then start steering.

Actually they really fixed that up since beta. You haven't been playing the missions so you don't know what the new Rurik is like. He actually follows you now instead of going ahead without you.

Apparently not. There was discussion on it last night.

You can capture his elite skills that you can't get anywhere else. I'd call that 'remotely' interesting.

Big whoop. I want drops. A new weapon, or a piece of armor - especially early in the game when you're not ready for more advanced skills.

I agree with the rest. They're issues that can be worked on, especially the NPC indicator thing or people dropping from parties (they should be replaced with henchmen). As for NPC indicators, you can see a 'furry' large green blip on your radar now to indicate a quest objective location. That wasn't in beta.

Right, but I'm talking about indicators for NPCs who are giving out quests.

No they don't. To test it, I just clicked to move with the mouse, then hit E to turn off and S to stop/back up and did. So this = a FACTUAL ERROR.

Hey, does it all the time with the keypad. Like I pointed out to Exitium, it doesn't just happen with mouse movement, either.

Wow, you want absolutely everything handed to you on a silver platter, utter handholding of the player? I would never have expected this from you. THAT'S WHY IT'S CALLED EXPLORATION! There's lots of cool stuff out there for you to find. What do you want, a game totally on rails with GO HERE printed on a big arrow all the time? That's kiddy consolized garbage.

It's not console crap, most CRPGs - including the action ones - have put labels on town maps for where the shops are. They even use different icons for different shops.

And once you've EXPLORED an area, I fail to see why it can't plop the name of that region on the map. Hell, if the world has multistory aqueducts, I think they probably master the skill of mapmaking.

Besides, fan sites will probably take it upon themselves to work this kind of stuff into guides, if nothing else. Some fan sites already have zoomable maps with all the cities. NPCs are a matter of time.

And the reason they do this is because the maps SUCK in the game. If the maps didn't suck, you wouldn't have fan sites tossing up maps.

They've made great maps given the need to make the game run on many different systems.

What does this have to do with anything?

NPC escorts are always the hardest in any game. But apart from that, you realize what you're asking for is the ability to Save/Load through ALL your mistakes, and various types of player handholding that would dumb the game down so much it might as well be Dungeon Siege.

No, I'm asking for the missions to be shorter because it sucks ass for a mission to take an hour with the only option for failure being repeating it until you get it right. NPC escorts aren't the hardest, there's other missions later on dealing with nodes and having to run objects to the nodes before the AI team fills the nodes. It's timed, and who has the most nodes at the end wins. Not only is that a goofy as hell mission, that node running crap follows about forty five minutes of fighting your way to that area, which you'll get to do over and over again if you fail it.

Also, if one or more members of your party bail on you in the mission, then you're left holding the bag. Odds are, you'll get to do it over again. Yay!

OH MY GOD SO ATTACK THE HEALER FIRST!!! That's just tactics!! WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?

Did you miss the phrase pack of healers in there? I'm talking about multiple healing critters in the same pack all healing everyone.

I see. So you would rather have another player skill for crafting that has to be "treadmilled" and maybe isn't even accessible to every character class. Brilliant.

Oh, so it's better that you can't do anything other than kill stuff? Crafting is in the game, it's apparently a pretty big part of the game, but the player can't have the skills to do it himself so he has to pay an NPC to do it. That's better than allowing players to craft?

It boils down to making the armor cost a lot of money because you can always just buy the components. Why not just sell ARMOR then? Why force the player to gather the components either by salvage or from the components trader and then go to a different NPC to have the armor put together? It's just a time sink at that point.

It's like milling the flour, gathering the eggs from a hen, churning some butter, refining some sugar, and then going to someone and asking them to bake a fucking cake for you. It's stupid.

So I guess what's better is either:
1. A character gets entirely shunted out of the mission immediately, for "dying," or
2. there's no consequence for death at all?
Give me a break.

How about losing gold or experience? Too bad no one's ever thought of that before! Wouldn't that be a new and innovative idea. You know, rather than making it so the player who slips up becomes weaker and weaker for that mission or area which makes them less and less of an asset for the party each time, how about taking something away that won't affect their ability to be useful in the party?!

Sounds to me like you're stomping your foot and pouting, along the lines of "WAAAH, I DON'T ALWAYS WIN!!" Don't be a brat, Saint.

I don't mind losing, I DO mind having to go through the same hour-long thing several times to get it right.

 

[Human Shield]

Not sure what version you played.

[*] Mouse commands totally override keyboard control. So, if you click the mouse, you better be damned sure you really want to do that, because otherwise you're going to have to click on the ground at your feet to stop moving. This also happens in combat at times. It's good clean fun to be attempting to run away with the keyboard steering only to find you can't move!

Not true. On my version the movement keys instantly override anything else.

[*] The map sucks. There's no listing of much of anything on the map other than red, green, and blue blips for the compass and town locations for the big map. Where's the names of areas? Where's the icons on the compass map to tell you which green blips are merchants versus the other green blips that are just meaningless townspeople or hirelings? Where's a special indicator for NPCs that are giving out quests at least?

Areas have sign posts and you can know the area you are in with the map button. But there isn't much in exploration zones if you don't have quests.
Hold the ALT key in towns and it will tell you where the merchants are. Usually only like 4 NPCs is most areas.
Quest NPCs always have floating symbol on them, you only get quests from these special indicators.

[*] The world is a maze. It really is. Navigating around the world is a pain, especially the first time you move through an area. Most areas consist of a few open spots and a whole lot of twisting pathways connecting them. What's even better is there are a lot of places you can't cross even though you've crossed similar terrain elsewhere. It's not always the case of a consistant steepness of hill being impassable.

Yeah this is a problem. You normally just have to follow roads and hope you find an outpost.

[*] The missions are totally gay. They're horrendously long with no saving during them. So, if you have a mission that takes about an hour, and your party croaks near the end of it - YOU GET TO DO IT ALL OVER AGAIN! Croaking isn't the only way to lose missions, though. Often there are fun objectives, like escort Prince Rurik who seems to like to run in to the middle of packs of beasts who rip him to shreads. He dies, you lose, and get to do it all over again.

I've liked the missions, they are usually short and challenging. Escort missions make things easier because the following guy is levels above you.

[*] Boss critters who drop NOTHING!

Hard to get big loot, bosses are usually just for the morale bonus.

[*] Healing critter stalemates!

This can be a problem but I play a mesmer so when I am in a party we can kill healers pretty fast, backfire and energy drain takes them out. Even groups go down when I spread my hexes out so they all can't heal one person.

[*] Crafting is lame.

I wouldn't want to waste skill points in crafting, the game is based on action.

[*] Death penalty fun.

It makes dieing costly without being overpowering.

[*] No way to replace people who leave the party.

It is annoying but the missions aren't that long and good parties don't die a lot.

How about losing gold or experience? Too bad no one's ever thought of that before! Wouldn't that be a new and innovative idea. You know, rather than making it so the player who slips up becomes weaker and weaker for that mission or area which makes them less and less of an asset for the party each time, how about taking something away that won't affect their ability to be useful in the party?!

I've beaten things with res'ed party. And the penalty only exists with a mission or zone. It would be a thousand time worse if you lost gold or XP forever.

All the missions have been pretty easy and you can always try and go through explore zones to skip missions if you can't beat it. You can walk around missions and go to the next one.

 

[Jed]

Damn, I was hoping this was the flip-flop thread...

 

[protobob]

In the options screen there is a checkbox to turn off movement with mouse click. You can still target with mouse, just not move with it if you do this (I did).

I do C (target nearest) space (attack/action) a lot, or T Space to attack target someone has called. Mouse targeting is annoying in a dense battle.

The mobs with healers can be a problem, but it's just a challenge you have to overcome. Tactics and all that.

Later on in the game item drops get better. For instance Lightning Drakes in the Gates to Kryta Mission are lvl 18 and drop some fine loot.

If you have henchmen, realize drops that would be assigned to them don't appear in game. So if you travel with henchmen you won't see as much loot beind dropped and might get the impression that loot is rarer than it is. You can kill a boss and the nifty item gets assigned to the henchmen and you never see it. This is the main drawback to henchmen. With a party of players you can say 'wow can I have so and so or trade for so and so or whatnot.'

Personally I liked the way Diablo 2 did armor but I don't mind the armor in this game. It hasn't been much of a hassle. I've only upgraded armor twice (maybe three times). One of the times I did it wasn't really necessary.

-protobob (aka Brother Bullfish)

 

[POOPERSCOOPER]

the minimap does suck bawls.

 

[protobob]

Pressing 'U' gives you the big map in a window you can scroll around in. It can be helpful.

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

In the options screen there is a checkbox to turn off movement with mouse click. You can still target with mouse, just not move with it if you do this (I did).

It's the steering that stops working, and it does that even during combat when you're NOT moving.

I do C (target nearest) space (attack/action) a lot, or T Space to attack target someone has called. Mouse targeting is annoying in a dense battle.

I do this as well.

The mobs with healers can be a problem, but it's just a challenge you have to overcome. Tactics and all that.

Bullshit. You have two Charr Martyrs with a boss Charr Martyr, all healing one another, you don't need tactics, you need massive damage or a counterspell. If you don't have either, you're screwed.

Only what? A dozen bad points accoridng to Saint? That's pretty impressive - even the great games like FO, BG, and PST have more.

Oh, there's a lot more. For example:

• The game doesn't remember spells or chat settings between areas. You cast a buff on someone, then change areas, you have to recast. It also doesn't remember the channel you were currently typing in, so if you're talking to the guild channel and switch areas, you have to use the hotkey again for guild talk. One's just an annoyance, but the other is fairly craptacular.
• Players and NPCs have HUGE ASS clip boxes and you can't walk through them. Remember in Fallout when Ian would block you in a dead end and you couldn't get out of that dead end? It happens in this game also. The first time it happened to me was with Gwen in the pre-searing area, but it's happened a few times since. It's really fun to be part of the way through a quest and have that happen.
• The character system sucks balls. Don't care what Penny Ante says. You can have gobs of skills, but you can only select eight of them at any given time - and you can only swap them in a town. If you're on a mission or in a hostile area(which is everything BUT a town), you're stuck with those eight skills. Basically, because of that, it's like NWN's combat meets Etherlords, where skills are the current card deck you have on hand.
  
  Now, you get skills by doing quests, but like I said, it's a deck of card style deal. There is no real "building" of characters. It's more about doing quests and getting new cards.
  
  At level up, you get five skill points. Skills basically determine what level of "card" you can use and modifies the attack a bit. Raising skills is weighted as well. So, if you're looking to up a skill past a certain point, you're basically going to have to level a few times before you can raise it.
  
  There really are no attributes to raise. Need more mana? Too fucking bad, you just get the basic level up raise. In nearly all other action RPGs, you can raise an attribute to help you out there. Not here, though! You just get the five skill points.
• The combat is pretty dull. It's better than the majority of MMORPGs, but.. It boils down to selecting a target and hitting 1-8 periodically as skills regenerate. So, it's basically NWN's combat with only eight skill slots and Sacred's skill regeneration time.
• The inventory interface sucks. It's about 80% of the vertical height of your screen, and two thirds of that is taken up by your paperdoll. Meanwhile, the important part of the inventory is reduced to itty bitty little icons at the very bottom. You have to mouse over the stuff in there to tell a lot of stuff apart because it's so tiny. Do I have six shells or are those fetid carapaces? Is that a long bow or a flat bow or.. ? But hey, at least your paperdoll is fucking huge!
  
  It's also rather clumsy, especially when you have to identify or salvage something that's in another pouch. The only way to do this I've found is to drag that item to the pouch where the salvage kit or identify kit is. If that pack is full, you have to drag something out, then drag that one thing in. It's not as bad as KotOR's, but it's worse than any other CRPG interface I've seen in a long while. Even most Roguelike's have better inventory interfaces, and they're all text!
• Where's the damned Remember password option for the login? 'Nuff said.

The best part is that they can be mixed and matched at will - you have a skill bar with eight slots and you can swap any eight you've unlocked for each mission. Also, you can swap attribute points around relatively easily, so you never have to delete an entire character for choosing to say, focus in axes and later deciding you like swords better.

Which means that any 9th level Ranger/Warrior is the same as any other 9th level Ranger/Warrior as long as they've done the same quests. That's not a good thing, that's a BAD thing.

In most modern ARPGs, you have different builds of the same class because there are gobs of options towards building them. In Guild Wars, you have X-number of skill points you're free to shuffle around, and all skills are given by quests and skills can be shuffled around the same way. It makes everything generic with the only difference between two characters of the same class being what secondary class they've chosen. Lame.

 

[protobob]

Eac level you get:
skill points
attribute points
more hp
possibly more energy (depending on class)

Skill points are used to pay for skills from skill trainers (and later on to buy a Signet of Capture). Attribute points are used to raise skills. Some skills are linked to attributes, so say if an Elementalist has a rank of 5 in Earth Magic, Armor of Earth works better than if he had no points in the attribute. Mesmers have an attribute that increases there casting speed. Warriors have skills that make them penetrate armor better and get more damage from weapons. True, some skills have attribute requirments to work properly (as do items).

I think the system is very flexible and I like not being locked into anything (other than my classes, and later on your can change your secondary).

Later on doing PvP it will be more about havnig eight players set up with skills that complement their skills plus other team members skills.

If you want more energy: magic items. I'm a warrior with 27 energy from wearing Gladiators armor.

Is not having a team that can do damage and has counterspells tactics? I've run into these healer monsters before and if everyone plays smart we've always been able to kick their ass. Everyone needs to focus on one healer at a time till they are down. They are beatable and part of the challenge.

I agree the fact you have to change your chat channel every frickin time you enter a mission/town is frickin annoying as heck.

The fact that buffs reset is just a reflection of the way the game is set up. It seems like you are being a bit picky.

You have three different sizes of interface to choose from in the options. I run at 1680x1050 so I use the largest interface size and it's fine.

I don't see how you can think the same level ranger is the same as the next same level ranger. True, they have the same potential tools to work from, but through different configurations of attributes, items, and skills they could be very different at any one time, an then there is their secondaires to consider.

I think if you don't like the game you should go punch Sol/Ex in the face and demand satisfaction/cash and be done with it. He'll flipflop at some point anyway, girn.

The game isn't perfect and no game is and all that. I'm having more fun with it than I thought I would.