I don’t blog much these days. I blame Forge.gg. I stream the games, they pop-up on Forge with all the best clips I can find, and I figure, hey, if anyone is all that interested in what I’m playing –> Forge.gg is that way 🙂 (I stream as Tipa there). But, the video quality can be low, and I don’t know if anyone will bother looking, or, without much context, even what they’re seeing there! But, because Forge.gg doesn’t play well with FRAPS, I usually have FRAPS off, and Forge.gg on. So, no cool screenshots unless I swap them. And sometimes I do that.
We’re into the Guild Wars 2 endgame, which brings the GW2 version of the endgame grind. Crafting which is just beyond ridiculous to get the top crafted items, dungeon roulette in the form of Fractals, which gives you a random selection of three mini-dungeons and a random boss fight just to mix things up. Why, I could tell you stories about the Thaumanova Reactor…
I’ve never been one to stay interested when the inevitable grind comes. All MMOs struggle to keep player attention once they’ve played through all the stories and leveled their character. Every MMO implements the law of diminishing returns, giving players less and less for more and more effort, until they can provide more content or players just give up. Eight years of EverQuest made me never want to do that kind of grind again. Once was enough for a lifetime.
However, being at the end game is freeing in that you can do pretty much whatever you want. I enjoy riding the world boss circuit. Just going from boss to boss — it’s just constant boss fights and decent loot, appropriate for your level. The best stuff is pretty rare, but if you like huge public raids (and I do), you just can’t go wrong here.
Last week we tried to save a failing Silverwastes run, but it didn’t work out. Still got some loot, just not as MUCH loot. Sunday we just kind of fell into the Honor of the Waves dungeon, in story mode. We’re all 80, pretty well geared in at least exotics, but it had been awhile since we just did a straight-up dungeon. I have to admit, we did pretty well. Some near wipes, but I don’t think we ever weren’t able to bring things back. Someone would kite the boss away while we brought people back up. These kinds of things illustrate just how unfriendly GW2 is to close melee. Typically, tanking the boss led to quick death.
The others in Team Spode have a way higher tolerance for endgame grinding than I do, and I’m thankful they let an easily distracted player like myself hang with them 🙂
1 thought on “GW2: Honor of the Waves”
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GW2 has no endgame. It does have massive, massive grind but since none of it gets you anything that makes your character more powerful it can hardly be dignified with the description “endgame”.
The crafting grind is expensive but extremely easy. You can buy your way to 500 and it would take you maybe an hour or two per craft tops. The only thing slowing you down after that would be the time-gating but even that you can buy your way past. Of course it would be a waste of time and money because there is currently nothing in the game you can do appreciably better with full Ascended and a Legendary than you could do with Exotics. Might take you a few seconds longer but the game was tuned around Exotics as “endgame” gear and they never changed that as far as I can tell.
Whether this will change in the expansion we will see but I doubt it.