Whales and Translations...

You may have noticed that once again Tyria is changing.  Today in the most recent patch, Lion's Arch offers subtle hints of the upcoming November 15th patch, The Lost Shores.

Posters filled with New Krytan begging to be translated littered the walls of the city, whales have begun to beach themselves on the shores, and an inactive portal is practically torturing us with it's potential.  I actually took a look in game after hearing about the changes, and I was surprised to see little buckets of water that you could pour on to the whales.  I was instantly thrown back to Whale Rider, a fantastic movie, by the way.  Sadly, nothing of interest happened, but I definitely thought it was a nice touch.

For full translations of the posters please refer to:  http://dulfy.net/2012/11/02/gw2-the-lost-shores-pre-events-and-teaser/  The site features some great detective and translation work by the community, and I think this patch holds a lot of promise.

If you watched the most recent interview with MMORPG.com on Twitch.tv, you already know some of the content coming.  There's an island being uncovered in a special one-time event over the weekend of November 16th.  Underneath this island is an extremely large multi-leveled dungeon that gets increasingly harder has you work your way to the bottom.  Some of the rewards are supposed to be unique and highly desirable by the community.  I can tell you that I know what I will be attempting to do over the next several weeks after the patch hits. There's also a new structured PvP map that will be beta tested, so PvPers keep an eye out for that.

My strongest criticism of Guild Wars 2 at the moment are the lack of rewards in certain areas of the game.  For me, my biggest frustration is that WvW tokens are practically useless.  The gear rewarded provides vitality and toughness, is relatively average looking (I do like the head piece however).  The legendary precursor is only useful if you want to go for a legendary.  And let's be honest, with the weapon precursors hovering around 300g, I have long given up that hope.  And then of course you can buy some siege weapons with tokens, but I still am accumulating them far faster than I could ever hope to spend them.

Rewards for dungeons are in a similar, albeit slightly better state. The only end-game karma options are the precursors for a legendary, again only really applicable if you are trying to obtain a legendary, and of course the exotics in Orr.  By now most people have saved up for a specific item or set have already received them, with the exception of a legendary.  However, people need more than a legendary to dream about, as that is an extremely long-term goal for most of the playerbase.   While many of the events in the game are fun, the reward system does not feel rewarding.  And that is becoming a big problem.  At the end of the day, the looting in Guild Wars 2 is turning out to be much like Diablo 3.  It's simply not fun.  Our chances of receiving anything worthwhile to use or to sell is incredibly small.  I was hoping there would be a higher skill/reward option that would would reward the player better things the harder the task was to achieve.  Explorable modes have really not been very hard to complete, and so I find it hard to justify greater rewards for them.  At the same time, story dungeon modes are practically useless after your first run through.  ArenaNet has revealed they are currently working on revamping several of the reward systems in-game as well as balancing in the dungeons.  I can't stress enough how important this is to the longevity of the game.  I am holding out hope the new reward structure will be in either this month's or next month's patch.