Guild Wars 2 Review

Day 3

"How can anyone possibly find this fun?" asked the Charr player next to me, taking time to type while he lay dying for the eleventh time. "We're getting our asses handed to us." That defeatist feeling wasn't unanimous, though: "What are you talking about? This is the most fun I've had in years!" countered my Asura companion, whom I was personally trying to revive while ghostly rangers pelted arrows and traps down on us. As for me, I sympathized with them both. I'd finally reached level 30 and made my way into the Ascalonian Catacombs, Guild Wars 2's first dungeon, and as a longtime dungeon junkie, I was happy to finally be sampling this part of the content. It feels different, it feels exciting, and it feels wildly unpredictable. But I can see where this could get old for some players, and the unfamiliarity of it all might be frustrating for players expecting easy dungeon runs.

If you don't stay on the move, you might find yourself spending much of the dungeon in that downed state.

One of the big selling points of Guild Wars 2 is that there's no more "trinity" -- that is, the neat little arrangement of tanks, healers, and damage-dealers (or DPS, in MMO speak) that makes up the core of dungeon and raid parties. In a good group, this is a beautiful but somewhat overly efficient setup. There's none of that here; whatever else you want to say about Guild Wars 2's dungeons, you can't argue that they're not different. Every player can heal themselves (and sometimes others, but with limited utility), and every character has some form of tanking ability, whether it be traditional armor, pets, or avoidance tactics. It sounds great in theory, but in practice it's controlled chaos. For one thing, death comes easy in the Ascalonian Catacombs, or at least the downed state that lets you attempt to finish off an enemy before your health runs out for the chance of a rally back on your feet and gives other players a chance to quickly revive you. If you don't stay on the move, avoid the constant area-of-effect spells, and use your crowd-control abilities to their maximum potential, you might find yourself spending much of the dungeon in that downed state.

War Should Be Hell

What I like about this is that it approximates what I imagine an actual battle would be like in these situations. I've always found it idiotic that supposedly intelligent, powerful bosses would spend all their time beating on the guy in the heaviest armor while there are plenty of people running around in robes he could kill with a flick of his wrist. That especially holds true for multiple enemies -- World of Warcraft's practice of letting a tank aggro all of the enemies in an area, making them completely ignore the four to 24 other dudes standing right next to him, is one of the worst breaks of immersion. Guild Wars 2, on the other hand, forces me to keep my attention on the fight at all times. Every person is equally important, and the beauty of the lack of a trinity is that you're not stuck if you can't find a healer or a tank. Once you have five people, you're ready to go.

Outdoors I'm melee, but indoors I'm all bow all the time.

We actually found ourselves doing comparatively fine without a fifth player after one unexpectedly left.

I tried to tell this to the cynical Charr player, but he was adamant that the Ascalonian Catacombs couldn't be completed without a dedicated healer. I pointed out that we'd never actually wiped, and we actually found ourselves doing comparatively fine without a fifth player after one unexpectedly left. We even defeated two bosses with just four players, although Guild Wars 2's limited visual range and predilection for staging dungeons fights in narrow hallways and on narrow ledges made it almost impossible to see the circles that signified incoming area-of-effect spells at times, and thus the fights sometimes seemed harder than they needed to be.

Even so, as we progressed deeper and deeper into the tombs, we fell into a groove, so to speak, and finding ourselves in the downed state became much less common. This leads me to believe that unfamiliarity with this type of dungeon gameplay is the main reason so many players are having trouble; in other words, we're simply too used to the trinity. At the same time, much of our early success revolved around chain-corpse runs where individuals who didn't get revived in time respawned and ran back to where the others were fighting. The tactic worked, but it seems cheap from a strategic standpoint.

Tyria's Heroes Need to Learn to Play

The thing is, we weren't even playing the hard version. We were playing the normal story mode dungeon, opposed to the more difficult exploration mode. That means that we got to watch cinematics featuring the Charr Rytlock Brimstone (he's the Collector's Edition statue) and the Norn Eir Stegalkin, both former members of the Destiny's Edge, Tyria's racially inclusive version of The Avengers. Those characters function as AI support on the mission, but from the foolish way they were acting, it was easy to see why Destiny's Edge wasn't a huge success according to the lore. Rytlock in particular had a nasty habit of running towards enemies while the rest of us were still nursing our wounds from the last pull, and Eir would often just stand still lobbing arrows while a ranger's trap burned her to death.

Close-quarters combat -- as if the dungeon weren't already challenging enough.

The worst part, though, was getting in. When we first made our group, three of us would show up in one version of the instance after zoning in, and two of us would find ourselves in another. When we tried dropping from the group and recreating it outside, we sometimes found ourselves in there alone. Even after we waited to get on the main server all at once and then zone in (instead of the overflow server, created to balance out the population), the problems persisted. In the end, all five of us got in by dumb luck, and that's why we didn't bother looking for a fifth player after one left. We were right to worry--after yet another player left (the disgruntled Charr), we found ourselves having the same zoning issues after we brought in two other players who we waiting outside. So we disbanded and called it a night. This is hopefully only a temporary issue, but it's one I also experienced months ago while trying to run the dungeons with the developers at ArenaNet, and I'm sad to see it still occur in the live release.

The Ascalonian Catacombs suffer from some other problems, such as non-boss NPCs that leash and reset to their original positions too easily (coupled with the fact that they leash at all), and the loot isn't terribly exciting. But for all that, I honestly had a blast. Dungeons these days are usually boring experiences, and I enjoyed the comparative unpredictability and fast-paced nature of the Ascalonian Catacombs. I was so riveted to the action that I found it hard to take time to glance down at my chat window. You can expect at least one more installment of my take on the dungeons, particularly for the challenging Exploration mode. After the rough beating we took in the the story mode, I can't wait to see what ArenaNet thinks a real challenge looks like.

Is it evil of me to be glad to hear Leif's getting knocked around a little? I'd be more worried about combat if no one ever died. Nothing's more boring than a game with no challenge. Would you rather have an MMO beat you up a little or coddle you?

Go to the next page to see Day 2